"As your attorney i advise you to rent a very fast car with no top"

(This post was inspired by Virtual Exile... smart guy... read the blog)

The so called "Big 3" in the auto industry are putting out their hats hoping that some of that free govt money from the "bailout" will float their way. This is not surprising. It's also not really an honest indicator of the real problems the auto industry faces.

I could go on and on about those problems... namely a crushing labor agreement disaster and an addiction to the idea of selling luxury cars in this market...

And maybe I will... in the near future.

This is about them asking for money.

Everyone right now is crawling out of the woodwork asking for a piece of that 700 billion(ever stop to think that there are only just over 300 million people in america? and not even all of them pay taxes... but still that's $2333.33 a PERSON)and it's no suprise that the automakers want their share.
Asking for Money is not an indicator of problems that weren't already there. Are they in some trouble? Yes. Can they fix it? If they would just put in a little work.

The sales percentages are misleading. You have to look at the real numbers. But I'll get at that sooner or later.

Don't worry about the Auto industry too much is my point... they have the power to save themselves if they just swallow a few ugly pills.

City Life Blues

I have a love hate relationship with city life.

"Let's get down to brass tacks. How much for the ape? "

For the longest time I've been reluctant to post in "blog" style. I have a massive love for physical written word... still I can't deny that this is a much better way to spread information quickly. A lot of my entries here are going to be excerpts from things I've put into print already in other mediums... still with how easy it is to put things down on here I can see a lot of things getting up here that you won't be able to find anything else.

Oh and if you like what you read send me an email, I'll happily send you a free copy of my latest newsletter.

this is an excerpt from a letter I wrote a former compatriot of mine. The personal side of it has been somewhat reduced but the meat and potatoes are fine for general consumption.

Enjoy!

Even if you can't consider me a friend, know that we are at the least compatriots. When all else but my principles was stripped away, I was left with a renewed focus on those ideas. And the Libertarian party still sums up all my concepts in a way more complete than anything else I've discovered. And the party is in very real trouble.

We are disorganized and fractured. We do not speak with a unified voice, and really do not reach out and show other people what we are really about. The leadership of the party at higher levels is misguided and still believes that the best our party can hope for is to be enough of a disruptive threat that the right and left will pander to us and give us the occasional throw away issue. Our biggest attraction for new members is our drug legalization stance, which is arguably our least important issue. What times like these call for is unifying leadership, and organization. The only way we can attract the sort of people we truly need to our party is to reform ourselves as something greater then a fractured association of quasi-intellectuals.

In part our intellectualism and resistance to centralization is our own undoing. Somehow in American politics the idea of "speaking to the middle" turned into "give the middle easy answers to placate them". This trend has had an increasing influence in the federal elections ever since Bush Sr. told us to "read his lips" and then proceeded to propose the largest tax hike since LBJ's "great society". In this last election the logical result of 25 years of pandering for power came storming in. Obama won the election because he was able to make his empty promises sound better then McCain's; neither candidate elected would have resulted in anything other than increased spending and tax hikes.

As libertarians our response in PA was distressing at best. There is no reason that a quarter million people should vote for a libertarian Attorney general and yet only 20,000 cast the libertarian vote for president. Voting results like that belie anything we might profess to believe. How can we present a third party as a viable option when we aren't even willing to vote for it ourselves? All media treatment of the libertarian party paints us a rag tag collection of gun nuts and drug fiends. The concepts of Libertarianism are much deeper and stronger than just those two issues. Unless we unify ourselves behind these ideals and principles the centralists and neo-socialists will run us under their treads.

And don't believe for a second that they don't want to. Freedom has always been the greatest threat to people who (well meaning or not) believe that society is not capable of self rule. Liberty has never been a mistress of cowardice. I often wonder what the founding fathers would think of what we've made of our nation. The populace has become addicted to the drug of free government money. College handouts and massive social projects are conducted at the taxpayers' expense, and the average person has no idea anymore of what a society would be like if we were all responsible for getting what we want and keeping what we have.

We are over schooled. Note that I do not say we are over educated, because I no longer believe that a degree means a person has educated himself in anyway. Our schools do not teach thought, they teach us to regurgitate and forget. Needless college is a sickness that threatens to destroy our nation. Everyone wants to be in middle management. Is it any wonder that companies move out of the US? The idea of skilled labor is dying here. We need plumbers, carpenters, masons and mechanics. We need skilled factory workers, and we need to get back to the labor based roots of our nation's past.

Ultimately most people do believe in the same thing that libertarians profess. But we are viewed as fringe political reactionaries. Unless some strong organization and coordination is brought to our party on a state and local level nothing can be accomplished. The party's senior leadership has been mesmerized with the bright bauble of federal elections. Before we can worry about the federal we must affect our efforts on the local. The municipalities of our great state are under assault from the counties. While I am relieved that the home rule charter in Lancaster failed, that it made it onto the ballot concerns me greatly. The local municipality is our best recourse for solutions to local problems, and if we allow it's absorption and negation by the county, then what follows but the blending of county into overruling state authority and ultimately state control being deferred to (no doubt appointed rather than elected) federal authority. The response of course should be to focus our attention on getting libertarians elected on the local level. Once people start seeing the effectiveness of a liberty based local government in the own back yards, the state and eventually federal elections will come naturally. But if we attempt to grasp at the oval office without building ourselves a base of proven Libertarians that have been effective in their offices we will never succeed.

We have a much harder road to walk then the neo-socialists. They are proposing things that the populous wants to believe; true or not. We are forced to preach responsibility and personal work ethic, rewards earned and failures suffered. But ultimately we are preaching freedom. And we must believe that once a person experiences freedom for themselves they will be loathe to part with it.

So it comes again to an old debate, hard truth against easy lies. Only by relying on our compatriots can we hope to stand against the tide of self-serving "altruists".

What I'm proposing is a greater communication between libertarians across the state. Currently most libertarian groups are nothing more than loose associations of friends that act with limited coordination at best. As a sickening example, the closest thing we have to a local liberty party web page in Lancaster is some pot-head's MySpace page. I'm hoping that greater organization will result in improvements in results for the growth of our party.

I hope that this letter finds all things going well for you and yours, and I wait for your response with the hope that I can still count on you as a working voice for libertarianism.



With all my respect

Jacob Daniel Young