It has happened again. A 15-year-old Newark, Ohio girl has been charged with felony child pornography charges for sending nude photographs of herself to a classmate in a text message.

Thats right, this is not the first time something like this has occurred.

In the most recent case, the girl has been charged with, “possessing criminal tools and the illegal use of a minor in nudity-oriented material” for sending a nude picture of herself to a 13-year-old boy and other classmates.

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Turn on the television, the radio. Scour the Internet. Google the term “financial crisis” and you are bound to hear frantic stories about the eminent Wall Street collapse. “We let the free market run a muck”, the stories will say, “and we need the government to find a way to correct the problem.”

Both US presidential candidates, in fact, also seem to agree, as was evident in the First Presidential Debate. Both believe that more government intervention is needed to keep this untamed beast in check.

But alas, like a voice in the wilderness, you may stumble upon a few that disagree. These lone free thinkers will tell you that the collapse is not a market failure, so much as a failure of government intervention into the marketplace.

To understand this idea it is first imperative to explore the reasons behind the crisis. Most agree that low interest rates have led to excessive borrowing, but few will venture to explore the cause of these artificially low rates. Many people fail to realize that the low interest rates were purposely put into place by the Federal Reserve.

These rates, which were inevitably lower than market value — Why else would they need to be set? — led to excessive borrowing by individuals who would have never taken out loans or mortgages in the first place. This action led to the financial bubble that has recently, and dramatically, burst.

Now we are feeling the after effects.

But why did the bubble burst? Low interest rates are good for the people, right? Well, lets look at it this way. What if the rates were as low as .5%? This would lead to a huge spike in the number of people taking out loans for entrepreneurial endeavors. It is inevitable, however, that many of these endeavors will fail, leading to individuals defaulting on their loans and banks not getting paid. If rates were higher many of these people would have never taken the risk in the first place.

No, the financial crisis is not a failure of the free market, it is a failure of fascism. Allowing one unchecked overarching organization known as the Federal Reserve to control the money supply and thus the interest rates has caused the failure.

And how do they propose to fix it? By having that same organization create even more money to bail out these banks.

Like a fly repeatedly striking a glass window, more of the same will not solve our problems. It is time to end the Fed.

The video speaks for itself: 

It was Lord Acton who said, “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”, and liberals, especially in the classical sense of the term, seem to prescribe to this maxim. Classical liberal thinkers like John Locke believed that in the ‘State of Nature’ people behaved in a selfish and greedy manner and were, overall, power-seeking creatures. This quality, combined with the absence of a mandatory governing body, would eventually lead to a life for all humans that was solitary, poor, brutish, short, and plagued by perpetual civil wars.

The quality of human greed was key to this philosophy, as it would not allow for a balanced, tolerant society to occur naturally. He believed, as many liberals and conservatives do, that a state apparatus was needed to counteract this inherent human greed and, in turn, create what he believed would be a civilized and balanced society.

This state, of course, would contain ‘checks and balances’ that would theoretically prevent the government from running rough shot over the rights of the people it ruled. Government would be formed by the consent of the people.

The problem here, however, is that when a government is created it also creates a position of absolute power, and thus absolute corruption, for those power-seeking individuals to strive for. In the United States, for example, those power-seeking individuals that Hobbes and Locke so feared can contend for any number of governmental positions e.g., governor, senator, representative, or even president for those that are truly corrupt. All of the checks and balances in the world will not stop a truly corrupt individual from pursuing, obtaining, and abusing these totalitarian positions of power.

The United States provides us with a solid example in the case of the illegal and unconstitutional federally funded War on Drugs. According to the tenth amendment of the countries constitution, “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.” Simply put, any powers not mentioned previously in the constitution will be given to the States and the people to decide on.

In California, however, medical marijuana has been legalized yet the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), an arm of the federal government, still conducts raids on the marijuana dispensaries and clinics in the state even though the Constitution does not grant them the power to do so. The positions of power have corrupted, on the macro scale, the individuals in the federal government that wish to impose their morals on the citizens of the country, and on the micro scale, the individuals in the DEA who are using force on the citizens to execute said morality.

The Constitution is supposed to provide a check on the federal government, but it has failed miserably in this and an innumerable amount of other situations. It is, after all, as forty-third president of the United States of America George W. Bush so eloquently put it, “just a goddamned piece of paper.” It truly has no power to prevent corruption.

When positions of power are created those interested in power will always seek those positions no matter what means are necessary. This is the liberal contradiction. Classical liberals are very quick to admit that greed and the ambition to achieve power are the major downfalls of humankind yet, just as quickly, they are willing to create positions of power that will give these greedy power-seekers ultimate control over the lives of others.

This power is often used to punish a politician’s enemy, reward their friends, pad their own coffers, start unconstitutional and illegal wars, impose morality, create monopolies, or take part in illegal activities like the smuggling of contraband, but it is rarely used for the good of the people. Power, indeed, does corrupt and the creation of positions of power will only lead to corruption on a more grandiose scale.

This article was originally published at DigitalJournal.com

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Apparently the Secret Service was called upon by the Republican Party to converge on all delegates at the RNC that supported Ron Paul.  What was their purpose?  Were they looking for guns and knives? Were they insuring the safety of the attendees at the convention?  Well, not exactly.  Turns out they were hired to strip the delegates of any Ron Paul signs, buttons, posters, or books that they might be carrying.  To top it all off, they were told that hey would not be able to reclaim their stolen property.  I guess the Secret Service can now be used to protect so-called ‘party unity.’  Wouldn’t want to show any diversity.   

Part 1:

Part 2:

Full text can be read here.

Overall great speech.  He was interrupted by the audiences applause somewhere around 18 times.