The Freedom Bulletin

According to this Boston Globe opinion piece by Dan Payne, the ideal Republican candidate for U.S. Senate…

“would be antiwar; prochoice; an outspoken advocate for civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights; willing to challenge a president of his or her party; a voice for the poor; a conciliator; someone who had seen war.”

So basically, the ideal Republican would be…a Democrat!

Being in favor of women’s rights and civil rights, and being a conciliator, those things aren’t really associated with either party. But if by gay rights, you mean gay marriage, then that’s not so Republican. Neither is being a voice for the poor if by that you mean a supporter of welfare, WIC, Medicaid, SCHIP, and other programs that steal from people who have money in order to give it to those who have less money. And although I am pro-choice and not a huge supporter of the war, I differ from most of the GOP on these issues.

This description that Payne gives refers to Edward Brooke, the last Republican Senator elected in Massachusetts. I don’t know much about Brooke, but judging from Payne’s description of him, he seems like a Democrat who for some reason decided to call himself a Republican. Payne brings this up in order to criticize Scott Brown for his JFK-inspired TV ad, his choice of role models, his positions on the issues, and especially his emphasis on cutting taxes.

“Brown’s candidacy rests on one plain notion: lower taxes… For a man who absurdly televises himself as President John F. Kennedy incarnate, he offers no idealism, no great challenge, no call to sacrifice.”

I don’t see how it’s absurd for Brown to compare himself to JFK. I also don’t see why lowering taxes is so unappealing to Payne. It is idealistic, principled, and in my opinion right, to believe that the government has no right to take money from people simply because they have a lot and give things to people simply because they don’t have a lot. Redistribution of wealth, sadly, is popular among a lot of people today, and it takes guts and ideological purity to oppose it. Standing up for small government and private ownership of property is brave, principled, and all of the things that Payne says it’s not.

Also, Payne concludes by saying that Brooke would have voted “yes” on the health socialism bill, and “if Scott Brown wins and keeps his promise to vote ‘no,’ he would give Massachusetts the damning distinction of supplying the vote that kills health care reform.”

I think it would be great if Brown won and killed the bill! While Brooke (according to Payne) would want to force all Americans to buy health insurance, Brown would actually vote to allow people to make their own decisions. If Payne’s characterization of Brooke is correct, that’s certainly one respect in which Brown would be a better senator than Brooke.

PS: My apologies for the downtime the last couple of days. Apparently Imperial Kingdom was hacked Everything is fixed now though!

Check out this great letter to the editor in today’s Boston Globe. It’s possibly the best letter I have ever read, and I agree with every word of it!

“Just because I am a single woman who didn’t make a life choice to pop out babies and throw myself on the mercy (and taxpayers’ backs!) of the state of Massachusetts doesn’t mean my situation is any less important to the reading public or any less dire.”

P.S. The other letter on that page isn’t bad either.

On the front page of today’s Boston Globe, next to the story on the Senate passing the health “reform” bill, there was a line that read ”Kirk’s crowning event. B1.” I turned to page B1 to find this story about how great it was that “Senator” Paul Kirk got to help pass the bill that fulfills Ted Kennedy’s dream of expanding health insurance coverage.

So let me get this straight: Kirk’s crowning event was being illegitimately appointed to the Senate by a corrupt governor, with the consent of a corrupt legislature and a corrupt judiciary, so that once Senator Nelson’s and Senator Landrieu’s votes were bought with millions of dollars, there would be enough votes to prevent debate on, and therefore pass, a bill that takes away everyone’s freedom to make their own decisions about health insurance.

Kirk should be so proud! NOT.

Thank you Boston Globe! This great article shows that there is no reason to ban elderly people from driving or require age-discriminatory testing.

Laws should never be made based on statistics, but even statistically, old people do not deserve to lose their driving rights. Drivers age 75 or older are 7% of all drivers but are involved in only 3.6% of crashes. In 2008, they accounted for 18% fewer crashes than in 2004. And the number of car crash deaths among people 70 and up dropped by 21% between 1997 and 2006, even though the population of people in this age group increased by 10%.

So much for the media brouhaha over a few recent accidents. I really dislike how news reports (and state legislators) make a big deal of individual incidents as reasons to change the law, but they never give any statistics about the normal frequency of such incidents, so viewers have no way of knowing whether the current level is above average or not. Kudos to the Globe for providing such statistics to combat the ignorant, knee-jerk reaction of those who want to further shrink our liberty.

Health post coming tomorrow as promised!

I found two cool opinion articles today which I agree with, one in the Globe and one in the Metro:

• “Got a comment? Keep it to yourself” by Douglas Bailey, about how online comments devalue journalism
• “Leave my granny alone” by Thomas Keown, about how testing drivers based on age is “excessive and can’t be done with dignity.” That just about sums up how I feel about the issue. I am glad to see someone who agrees with me amid the hordes of people calling for increased testing.

I think it’s terrible that the newspaper industry is losing ad revenue and subscriptions because of the Internet. The other day I just thought of a solution to this problem. It’s radical, and most libertarians wouldn’t like it, but I think it’s worth a try: I think that Internet advertising should be banned.

This would ensure a thriving newspaper industry, because if there were no ads on the Internet, papers wouldn’t lose ad revenue to the Internet.

It would have other benefits as well. Many Internet advertising companies violate people’s privacy rights by tracking their IP addresses and online activities in order to target ads to them. Ads in newspapers don’t do that!

Plus, online ads make pages load really slowly and make them ugly. Although newspaper ads can be ugly and annoying, especially if there are too many of them, they don’t make the newspaper load any slower!

Yes, banning online advertising would have huge consequences, many of them negative. Many websites exist for the purpose of making money through ads, so they would go out of business. But maybe sites whose sole purpose is to make money aren’t as good as sites that are created for enjoyment. Without ads, we’d lose numerous popular websites, but sites created by regular people as a hobby would become a more important resource.

Overall, I’d rather lose some major websites than lose newspapers. Current trends in newspaper readership are discouraging, and the death of newspapers would be simply unacceptable. We need to do something about this, and banning online ads might just work.

It seems like the world (or at least Boston) is going in a bad direction right now. The Boston Globe, an integral part of many people’s daily routines and an invaluable source of news, is in danger of closing, and now another venerable Boston institution, the MBTA, might have to drastically cut its service and raise fares. In other depressing news, the iconic Zakim Bridge will no longer be lit up at night to save money for the Turnpike Authority.

If the state does not raise its gas tax by 19 cents a gallon, the T might have to raise fares by 25-30%, eliminate commuter rail service on nights and weekends, eliminate bus routes and subway stops, and reduce the frequency of trains and buses by 50% during midday, nights, and weekends. These are just a few of the cutbacks – check out the Globe for a more extensive list.

I am vehemently against raising the gas tax. Massachusetts has WAY too many taxes already, and more taxes are the last thing the state needs. I’d rather have $7 tolls than a higher gas tax, and I’d rather have the T cut services and raise fares than have any kind of tax increase.

However, there are a plethora of things in the bloated state budget that should be cut before the T. Just take a look at this game, which was created by the Globe to show how hard it would be to balance the budget if Question 1 passed (which it very unfortunately didn’t). I was able to fairly easily cut more than I needed to by eliminating government spending on health care ($13 billion) and human services ($3.59 billion), and a couple more billion in various other categories. A lot of people would disagree with me on this, but I don’t think it’s the government’s role to pay for people’s medical services or social programs. Cuts in these areas could be used to give the T and Turnpike the funding they need to balance their budgets. I love the T, and the Zakim Bridge is a beautiful icon of Boston. While I am really supportive of the state government cutting its budget, these are the last things that should be cut.