CALL TO ACTION:

On April 9th Texas Gov. Rick Perry joined state Rep. Brandon Creighton and sponsors of House Concurrent Resolution (HCR) 50 in support of states rights under the Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The Tenth Amendment states:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

In his speech Gov. Perry states “I believe the federal government has become oppressive. I believe it has become oppressive in its size, its intrusion in the lives of its citizens, and its interference with the affairs of our state.”

The Freedom Factory is launching a campaign to get every state government to adopt comparable legislation, reaffirming their legitimate rights within the context of a free American Republic.

We need to spread the word, to mobilize residents from every state in the Union to remind our public servants that we will not tolerate erosion of our rights and the Constitution that guarantees them.

Here’s a sample letter you are urged to send every public servant in your jurisdiction. Send this to your state’s governor and state legislatures, and leave a comment below to sign our petition:

The federal government has grown too big and too powerful, infringing upon the legal sovereign rights of our state affirmed by the Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. There is a resurgent federalist movement best highlighted by the Texas Legislature that I want implemented in [list your state]. The Texas legislature will soon be voting on House Concurrent Resolution (HCR) 50 that reaffirms state sovereignty. We need similar legislation in our state.

No one in Washington D.C. knows how to run our state better than our own residents. I am tired of our government bowing to federal authority. I demand that we reassert our right to self governance. I urge you to do all you can to support this movement and regain control of our state from Washington D.C.

The residents of this state need you to protect them from a growing central government. I hope that you have the courage to stand up for those to whom you are responsible.

Here’s a great resource for finding the names and contact information for your elected representatives. Take a few minutes to cut and paste the sample letter into an e-mail and let these lawmakers know we mean business. Enough is enough!

Please join our cause and subscribe via e-mail if you want to continue following these updates and fight to preserve our Constitutionally protected freedoms.

You can read more about Gov. Perry’s speech here, or watch it directly below:

—–SPECIAL OFFERS—–

The Federal Reserve is creating tens of trillions of new dollars, debasing our currency, and silently taxing us all through inflation. With tens of trillions in federal budget deficits on the horizon there is nowhere for the US dollar to go, but down.

Refuse to be a victim of this flawed financial system, buy gold and silver NOW!

With hyperinflation and risk of economic disaster increasing with each dollar Congress recklessly spends, it pays to be prepared: Consider stocking up on Emergency Supplies:

You just finished reading Petition Your State's Government to Reaffirm 10th Amendment on The Freedom Factory. Please consider leaving a comment!

In a review of intelligence activities by the Justice Department, the National Security Agency (NSA) was caught abusing its domestic surveillance authority, accessing e-mails and phone calls within the United States.

Despite the Justice Department taking “comprehensive steps to correct the situation and bring the program into compliance,” we should all write our legislators complaining about this infraction of our rights and demanding they take steps to prevent future illegal spying on our citizens. Here’s a sample letter you can send your representatives:

Senator/Representative _________,

Domestic eavesdropping is a serious issue for which I harbor deep concerns. Although limited authority to investigate suspicious individuals is reasonable given due cause, it is entirely unacceptable for any element of government to conduct intelligence gathering activities on the general citizenry without prior and specific court approval.

Law adopted by Congress in 2007 requires court approval to monitor purely domestic communications. Violation of this law by any public body should be immediately investigated, details made public, and offenders punished. Consequences must be made clear to public servants who violate the law.

Continued infractions of our liberties will not be tolerated. We look to Congress to re-evaluate domestic surveillance legislation and ensure it adequately protects our inalienable rights as citizens of a free country.

Here’s a great resource for finding the names and contact information for your Congressional representatives. Take a few minutes to cut and paste the sample letter into an e-mail and let these lawmakers know we mean business. Enough is enough!

Please join our cause and subscribe via e-mail if you want to continue following these updates and fight to preserve our Constitutionally protected freedoms.

Domestic eavesdropping has been a contentious issue since 2005, when it was discovered that for years following the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the NSA intercepted international phone conversations and e-mails involving U.S. citizens without a warrant.

In 2007 Congress ended that program and passed legislation requiring the NSA to get court approval to monitor the purely domestic communications of Americans who came under suspicion. Since details of the Justice Department’s findings have not been made public it is not clear what aspects of the current law have been broken by the agency.

—–SPECIAL OFFERS—–

The Federal Reserve is creating tens of trillions of new dollars, debasing our currency, and silently taxing us all through inflation. With tens of trillions in federal budget deficits on the horizon there is nowhere for the US dollar to go, but down.

Refuse to be a victim of this flawed financial system, buy gold and silver NOW!

With hyperinflation and risk of economic disaster increasing with each dollar Congress recklessly spends, it pays to be prepared: Consider stocking up on Emergency Supplies:

You just finished reading Stop NSA From Spying On Americans on The Freedom Factory. Please consider leaving a comment!

We are moving closer towards a political economy every day. Every dollar borrowed, taxed, printed, and spent by government really comes from the private sector.  Trillions of dollars of national resources are being allocated by politicians and bureaucrats towards things they claim will benefit our economy. Congress just passed a $3.6 trillion budget ($1.2 trillion in deficit), and combined the Federal Reserve and Treasury have dumped $13 trillion into the economy in the last 16 months. What we must all ask ourselves right now is whether or not we trust government with our money?

The stock market certainly seems to believe in Big Brother:

Since the absolute low in early March, the Nasdaq is up 27.8%, the S&P 500 is up 24.5%, and the Dow Industrial Average is up 22.5%. These are massive gains in an extremely short period of time. Are we finally seeing results from TARP and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act? Is Congress doing something right, and is the market finally warming up to President Obama?

We trust government for so much these days. We have the military, police forces, regulations, laws, courts, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, and myriad other programs upon which we have come to depend. Soon we’ll need government to run our health care, regulate carbon emissions, tell cows how much they can fart, and give us permission to take sight-seeing trips to Antarctica! But how much do we really need of some adults to tell other adults what to do? That is, after all, what government boils down to.

Being that government officials are drawn from the same population pool as everyone else, we ought to question their omnipotence. Are they fallible just like you and I? Or does winning an election or securing a federal union job suddenly strip one of human vice?

In “Contributing Factors To The Housing Boom” I wrote that multiple layers of government caused the housing troubles currently tearing apart our economy. Without the Federal Reserve pumping up the money supply, without Congress creating Fannie and Freddie and mandating they provide junk loans to people who had no chance of repaying them, and without local and state micro-regulators dictating everything from building sizes to where and how you could build, the housing market may have simply functioned like any other market. We didn’t exactly witness cheese prices behaving “irrationally exuberantly” over the last decade!

So if we accept that the people running government are fallible, and that they even have some blame in the distorted, crashing economy in which we are all forced to eke a living, we ought to question all the assumptions they expect us to take for granted. Maybe Americans should cut back on spending and save? Maybe interest rates should float higher to represent scarcity of capital for real economic activities? Maybe adding another $10 trillion to the national debt over the course of the next decade is not a good thing?

If you think that what government is doing is good-if you trust them with your life’s savings, then go ahead and listen to your regular financial adviser. Roll your savings back into the stock market. Buy government bonds. Oh, and don’t forget to buy another SUV, a bigger house, line your walls with gold the IMF is selling, and buy yourself that marble floor you’ve always wanted! The good times will return!

Or maybe they won’t. Our government and the Federal Reserve are rolling dice with our futures. They are playing games with our currency, and they are betting that their blind spending of confiscated trillions will magically restore our economy to pre-crisis conditions. This is a tall order!

Should you suddenly become suspicious, here are a few things you can do to protect yourself:

1) Avoid non-dividend paying stocks. Seek yield in everything you do. Stocks are decent inflation hedges since companies can increase prices to compensate, but you should avoid stocks that retain 100% of earnings. Retained earnings are essentially bets that the company can earn sufficiently high returns on incremental capital expenditures. In a tough business environment this becomes less realistic.

2) Buy short-term debt instruments. Avoid long-term maturity bonds since increasing inflation will wipe out coupon payments and resale value on the secondary market. The big exception to this is if you require a fixed income for living expenses for which the current risk-adjusted yield provides. If you can lock in rates you know you can live on, by all means do so.

3) Buy real estate. During an inflationary environment you want to be a net debtor holding fixed rate liabilities. Each new dollar printed makes all the others less valuable, so you might as well use this to your advantage-repay fixed rate debt with less valuable dollars in the future. The second benefit of real estate is that rents can grow with inflation, so long as your tenants do not hold long-term leases already locked in at pre-inflation terms.

4) Treasury Inflation Protected Securities (TIP). These are Treasury securities with fixed real returns supplemented by an inflation premium. These are good so long as the government issuing them remains solvent. To diversify this risk consider the international equivalent, WIP.

5) Commodities. When the world can no longer trust our paper money people turn to commodities as a refuge. Commodities are tangible and have real utility, unlike government paper. Gold and silver are traditionally viewed as currency replacements, agricultural goods always have value in that people must eat, and energy holds the world together. Consider DBC, USO, GLD, SLV, GSG, and DBA, to name a few.

If you’re really savvy and feeling bold you could short the market, hedge with VIX, or join a local militia.

—–SPECIAL OFFERS—–

The Federal Reserve is creating tens of trillions of new dollars, debasing our currency, and silently taxing us all through inflation. With tens of trillions in federal budget deficits on the horizon there is nowhere for the US dollar to go, but down.

Refuse to be a victim of this flawed financial system, buy gold and silver NOW!

With hyperinflation and risk of economic disaster increasing with each dollar Congress recklessly spends, it pays to be prepared: Consider stocking up on Emergency Supplies:

You just finished reading Do You Trust Big Brother With Your Portfolio? on The Freedom Factory. Please consider leaving a comment!

“ In questions of power, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.” Thomas Jefferson

For those of us who love individual liberty, free-markets and limited government, we face each day, burdened, with more news of the march toward socialism and the destruction of the principles of constitutionalism. The principles, upon which this nation were founded, are being discarded for the failed elitist theories of socialism.

I believe, however, that the move, by the current administration, toward a centralized, messianic government, does not reflect the will of the majority of the American people nor does it reflect the intent of the Framers of the Constitution.

We must be reminded, then, by what authority government operates and what limits the Framers of the Constitution intended to impose on government? Russell Kirk explains, in his excellent book, “The American Cause,” writing,

“The constitutions of the American commonwealth are intended – and have successfully operated – to restrain political power: to prevent any person or clique or party from dominating permanently the government of the country. Sir Henry Maine, the nineteenth-century historian of law, remarked that the American Constitution is the great political achievement of modern times. The American constitutional system reconciles popular government with private and local rights. It has been called “filtered democracy” – that is, the reign of public opinion chastened and limited by enduring laws, political checks and balances, and representative institutions. It combines stability with popular sovereignty.

It is one of the great premises of American political theory that all just authority comes form the people, under God: not from a monarch or a governing class, but from the innumerable individuals who make up the public. The people delegate to government only so much power as they think is prudent for government to exercise; they reserve to themselves all the powers and rights that are not expressly granted to the federal or state or local governments. Government is the creation of the people, not their master. Thus the American political system, first of all, is a system of limited, delegated powers, entrusted to political officers and representatives and leaders for certain well-defined public purposes. Only through the recognition of this theory of popular sovereignty, and only through this explicit delegation of powers, the founders of the American Republic believed, could be the American nation keep clear of tyranny or anarchy. The theory and the system have succeeded: America never has endured a dictator or tolerated violent social disorder.

I firmly believe that Americans are not ready to abandon the Constitutional principles of limited government, nor are they ready to allow the federal government to continue to overstep those principles. We have achieved the greatest freedom of any people on earth and history has not provided another prospect for bettering mankind. What it has shown us is that government must be bound “…from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.”

You just finished reading Chains of the Constitution on The Freedom Factory. Please consider leaving a comment!

Adam Smith, who lived in the eighteenth century, provided the philosophical and most systematic arguments for the underpinnings of a laissez-faire economic system in his book “The Wealth of Nations.” Smith makes the argument that it was only the interference of government which disrupted the natural working of economic society and created poverty and decay rather than abundance and harmony. As Smith explained:

The natural effort of every individual to better his own condition, when suffered to exert itself with freedom and security, is so powerful a principle, that it is alone, and without any assistance, not only capable of carrying on the society to wealth and prosperity, but of surmounting a hundred obstructions with which the folly of human laws too often encumbers its operations.

The drive for greater government regulation is the drive toward increased poverty, unemployment and the loss of liberty. With the Obama administration pushing an ever expanding federal government plan to take control of our financial institutions, health care system, the auto industry, and its attack on free speech, the time is now to clearly articulate the differences between free markets and free people, and government administered markets and government control of our lives.

For Freedom’s Sake

You just finished reading Freedom, Prosperity, and Government Obstruction on The Freedom Factory. Please consider leaving a comment!

About the time our original thirteen states adopted their new constitution in 1787, Alexander Tytler, a Scottish history professor at the University of Edinburgh, had this to say about the fall of the Athenian Republic some 2,000 years earlier:

“A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government.”

“A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always vote for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.”

“The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, those nations always progressed through the following sequences:

1. from bondage to spiritual faith;

2. from spiritual faith to great courage;

3. from courage to liberty;

4. from liberty to abundance;

5. from abundance to complacency;

6. from complacency to apathy;

7. from apathy to dependence;

8. from dependence back into bondage”

Given the nature of our elections, it’s evident we’re somewhere in complacency/ apathy/dependence stage. Is free healthcare, government run education, welfare, Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, and perhaps one day soon, a free Soviet-style bread line worth it?

You just finished reading The Lifecycle of Civilizations on The Freedom Factory. Please consider leaving a comment!