http://www.hslda.org/docs/news/200806190.asp

http://www.hslda.org/docs/news/washingtontimes/200806170.asp

Posted by Robert Russo at 11:50 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The Patrick Henry Supper Club presents:

Roy Scherer
on "marijuana decriminalization"

The PHSC will meet at its usual location, Eastern Buffet, 7586 W. Broad St. Richmond, VA 23294
(in Merchants Walk Shopping Center). Dinner is at 6pm and the main event is 7pm.

Posted by Robert Russo at 08:19 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The orginal story is about a way to reduce gun deaths in the US. If the number they quote is accurate (12,000) then there has been a significant reduction in gun deaths over the last decade. The original story can be found at
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-op-sugarman29-2008jun29,0,1307373.story. It's simply suggesting another big government power grab similar to the tobacco settlement. For fun, I thought I'd rewrite the story to take on something much more dangerous in our daily lives: the automobile.

This year, about 30,000 Americans will die in a car accident. It's a staggering figure, and even though lawmakers have continued to pass laws to try to bring the number down, they have not significantly reduced the death rate. Indeed, for the last decade, cars have steadily outranked homicide as a cause of death.

Car manufacturers insist that these deaths are not their fault, preferring to pin the blame on reckless drivers and irresponsible drinkers. They have fiercely resisted even minimal restrictions on sales and have simultaneously washed their hands of responsibility for this "collateral damage."

What is to be done? The conventional regulatory approaches seem to be failing. A more recent strategy, in which victims or municipalities bring lawsuits against car manufacturers or retailers, seems legally and politically unpromising since, in this issue, people show uncommon amounts of good sense and are not whipped into an emotional frenzy by politicians and the media. People accept 30,000 deaths a year as the cost of owning a car in America.

We propose a new way to prod car makers to reduce deaths, one that would be unlikely to put them out of business or preventing sober drivers from using the road. By using a strategy known as "performance-based regulation," we would deputize private actors -- the car makers -- to deal with the negative effects of their products in ways that promote the public good.

In other words, rather than telling car makers what to do, performance-based regulation would tell them what outcome they must achieve: Reduce deaths by cars. Companies that achieve the target outcomes might receive large financial bonuses; companies that don't would face severe financial penalties. Put simply, car makers -- whose products kill even when used as directed -- would have to take responsibility for curbing the consequent public health toll.

Under our plan, Congress might require car makers in the aggregate to reduce car deaths from 30,000 to, say, 17,000 in 10 years, with appropriate interim targets along the way. Individual firms would each have their own targets to meet, based on the extent their cars are currently used on the road. Or Congress might simply leave it to neutral experts to determine just how much of a numerical reduction should be required -- and how quickly. Either way, the required decline would be substantial.

How would car companies go about reducing car accident related deaths? The main thing to emphasize is that this approach relies on the nimbleness, innovation and experimentation that come from private competition -- rather than on the heavy-handed power of governmental regulation. Car makers might decide to add sobriety sensors to their cars, or to work only with dealers who meet certain standards of responsibility. They might withdraw their high horse powered engines from the consumer market, or even work hand in hand with local officials to close bars and increase youth driver education opportunities. Surely they will think up new strategies once they have a legal obligation and financial incentive to take responsibility for the harm their products cause.

Performance-based regulation leaves it up to them to decide. This is the same outcome-based approach that the No Child Left Behind program takes concerning schools. Through No Child Left Behind, parents and school officials set achievement targets for students, and schools then have to figure out how to meet the targets. Similarly, performance-based regulation is used in a variety of pollution-control schemes and is becoming the preferred global strategy to combat climate change. For example, under pressure from coalitions of environmentalists, scientists and citizens, regulatory bodies are ordering public utilities to sharply cut their carbon emissions. The companies are responsible for designing solutions to best achieve that goal, which could include switching fuels, changing the way they produce electricity, installing scrubbers on smokestacks and so on.

Sen. Michael D. Enzi (R-Wyo.) has put forward a proposal along the same lines to target tobacco. Typically, anti-smoking organizations lobby Congress to give the Food and Drug Administration regulatory power over cigarette companies, and press locally to increase tobacco taxes, run more government anti-tobacco ads and boost enforcement of bans on sales to minors. Under Enzi's performance-based regulation plan, however, the tobacco companies would simply be told by Congress that they have to cut their customer base by about 50% in 12 years. It would then be up to the companies to figure out how to curtail smoking rates.

So how exactly might this work in the case of car makers? For nearly all car deaths, law enforcement officials are able to identify the precise type of vehicle that was used. From that data, reliable statistical projections can be made to determine each company's approximate share of all deaths. Each company's quotas would be based on the data, and tied to an ever-decreasing number of deaths.

A more fine-tuned strategy would set different car-accicent-death-reduction quotas based on the specific car -- with larger reductions mandated for cars that are more commonly involved in road deaths.

The plan might even include a "cap and trade" feature. If some car makers managed to reduce the deaths caused by their product even faster than the rules required, they could sell that excess to other companies.

If car makers fail to reach the performance targets, they would face substantial financial penalties that would hike the cost of the cars they make and drive home the huge negative social consequences they now cause.

Our proposal is not a tax on car sales. As long as car companies met their goals, they would pay nothing extra to the government. Indeed, the plan might reward them with bonuses.

Performance-based regulation is not about the government denying people access to cars. It's not an academic theory about the underlying causes of car accidents, nor is it a restriction on the right of law-abiding citizens to drive. Instead, it is a practical way to align the car companies' interests with the public interest and, ultimately, to save lives.

The sad part about all this is that there are way too many people who will think this is a reasonable idea and should be implemented on January 21, 2009.

Posted by Jon Walker at 08:51 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/06/26/scotus.guns/index.html

Posted by Robert Russo at 12:08 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The Libertarian Party of Henrico will be holding its annual convention at 6:30 PM Wednesday evening, at North Park Branch Library, 8508 Franconia Road, Richmond VA 23227 (1/2 mile from I-95 exit 83). The attendance of all interested libertarians is requested for the election of officers and any proposed amendments.

Posted by Robert Russo at 03:26 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The February ruling by a California court that broke with that state's long tradition of homeschooling will appear before a court of appeals on June 23, effectively determining whether all homeschooling families in the state will be allowed to continue or forced to enroll their children. Since HSLDA is the organization that provides legal defense for homeschooling families all over the country, it's fitting that HSLDA chairman Mike Farris will be keynote speaker for the defense. He will probably have to explain the basic tenets of home education to the usual primitive questions while fighting off complex justification for standardized education catered to judges who are products of formal education themselves. Although the governor and most other authorities have declared outrage over the threat to homeschooling, this case is a particularly hard sell because the defendants are an atypical homeschooling family of fundamentalist isolationists whose neglect of their children's education might be real, and the ruling against them was in accordance with the law according to Farris himself (the entire practice of homeschooling in California is an unwritten legal leniency).

As if this weren't enough, Farris doubles as an employee of our own state's Patrick Henry College (much like our party's Jim Lark is a professor at UVA) and is required to do fundraising at the same time he must prepare for what might be the biggest case of his career on the other side of the country. To keep his job stable, HSLDA is making an unusual request that people show their support by making donations to Patrick Henry College. The irony of this is palpable. These contributions can be sent to https://secure.phc.edu/phc/DonationForm.asp, or by mail to Patrick Henry College, One Patrick Henry Circle, Purcellville VA 20132. For more info on the legal battle go to www.hslda.org/courtreport/V24N2/V24N201.asp.

Posted by Robert Russo at 09:05 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

by Robert Russo

Anyone who takes up the fight for liberty discovers our enemy has no name, face or brand. It is not any one institution that is empowered to stifle civil liberties but their collaboration in which corruption exists. When we target government, power is switched over to private industry and vice versa, a relationship in which morals, laws and accountability slip namelessly and facelessly through the cracks. Examples of this union are Halliburton and other government contracting overseas, charter schools, and private companies used in enforcing the law. The threat to liberty is an enigma that passes from private ambition to board room to public policy, and these relationships require monitoring with far more scrutiny than the backing of any one party or practice. Our simple process of choosing leadership and laws is not equipped to call these shady deals into question.

Now apply this imbalance to a larger scale. The other day a young person asked me to explain socialism, to which he replied "So stores can't choose what price to sell their merchandise, it's all just one big company. Those bastards!" Similarly an adult commented to me how the Baby Boomers, and Pres. Bush among them, view the world through a Cold War attitude that we are a righteous nation and should enlighten the world to our standard. That may be true for countries that do not yet have civil rights and consentual government, but many bright ideas come from socialism such as government responsibility to the citizen. No one who loves capitalism thinks every single entity should be a competitor and markets completely unregulated. The key to making it work is knowing its faults.

Perhaps it would be more accurate to say these ideas don't "come" from capitalism, socialism etc., but such general terms are a brand name placed upon a set of life choices which are infinite (and infinitely ambiguous). This branding has a purpose, for example I often hear people speak inconsistently about institutions like academics and the health industry, mixing their compliments and complaints, and it's clear to me why no one is able to stop this corruption because they cancel out their own views, refusing to make a choice. It's easy to get lost in the ambiguity of leaving no stone unturned, which anyone can see in the endless legislative runaround of the General Assembly, and the UN which never seems to make up its mind when there is a crisis.

So it is difficult to admit this business of choosing sides, slating a practice as right or wrong, is how we got into the current war and numerous other predicaments. Sen. Obama seems equipped to break these preconceptions by his willingness to meet with leaders that have long been slated as dead ends.* On our home turf however, the relationship between public and private entities is almost always decided without consent from the citizen, but at the expense of the citizen. Police using private enterprise to enforce the law (such as the private towing company and body shop that doubles as Richmond's police impound yard) allows officers to make summary judgments at the expense of both the taxpayer and their private partner, leaving it a civil matter between those two, when this role should be reversed. It should be law enforcement's responsibility to ensure the ways and means of their decisions or not to make them, decisions which are rightly up to the citizen and private businesses with the law moderating only.

As a writer of speculative fiction I've often thought if there were two Earths, the ruling class of both would meet in secret until there was a world of privilege and a slave world. This union and displacement has happened in every power struggle in history, leading H.G. Wells to write of a future in which the human race is split in two, finally resulting in a race of giant crabs hunting tiny butterflies on a preternatural beach.** Both the desire to hold fast to our principles and the flexibility to hunt down corruption in any arena, even our own and within ourselves, must be put to use to advance the cause of liberty.

*http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-na-campaign24-2008may24,0,6735347.story
**http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Time_Machine

Question of the Week: In your personal life what collaboration have you noticed between public and private entities that disadvantage the citizen and how would you change it? Send your thoughts to russo@richmondliberty.org.

If you have topics of interest to libertarians please let us know. We welcome your input!

Posted by Robert Russo at 07:15 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The Prince George Journal reported on Thursday that plans to build the Outlying Landing Field across a large swath of western Prince George County near the Tri-Cities have overlooked the existence of several local churches within that tract. (This is a local paper with no online presence.) The Navy's "scoping period" to report any issues with this project ends today. Tomorrow a televised interview with representatives from three VA counties and a Navy spokesman will air at 11:30 AM on WVEC channel 13, without questions from the public. The amount of consideration the Navy has for the homes and lives they plan to displace to accomplish their airborn mission in Iraq can't be more clear than this manner of "scoping" out the risks with a brief window for citizens of their own volition to bring issues to the attention of military authority, and the maps of our rural counties they looked over in the first place marking non-municipal areas full of prive properties for their own purposes, confirmed by helicopter flyovers which sometimes see homes and churches and sometimes miss them. For further developments go to www.novaolf.com.

"The Navy would buy all houses or homes in the area. Graveyards and churches would have to be relocated.”*
*http://www.vancnews.com/articles/2008/01/25/emporia/news/news9822.txt

Posted by Robert Russo at 12:38 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Two opportunities to spread the petition to get senate candidate Bill Redpath on the ballot are coming up this week. The LP will have a booth at the Ashland Strawberry Faire on Saturday, 10AM-5PM. Several shifts are open or show up anytime and be welcome. The Home Educators Association is having its 25th annual convention and fair as well from Thursday through Saturday at the Convention Center. Although the LP has a less official presence there it is an excellent location. There is a registration fee. To RSVP for this Saturday or get forms to petition elsewhere contact Jon Walker at jlw61@yahoo.com.

Posted by Robert Russo at 08:30 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The Patrick Henry Supper Club presents:

Alan Pell Crawford
author of "Twilight at Monticello: The Final Years of Thomas Jefferson"
www.amazon.com/Twilight-Monticello-Final-Thomas-Jefferson/dp/1400060796

The PHSC will meet at its usual location, Eastern Buffet, 7586 W. Broad St. Richmond, VA 23294
(in Merchants Walk Shopping Center). Dinner is at 6pm and the main event is 7pm.

Posted by Robert Russo at 09:09 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)