America's Youth vs. Big Government

6 months ago, someone turned me on to a great video put together on YouTube which explains the fallacy of the Federal Reserve and dangers of inflation perhaps better than any other single source I have come across today. Titled ‘Duck Tales Inflation Lesson,’ the video is a four minute clip taken from an episode of Duck Tales (one of my favorite shows growing up. I totally remember this one) where the ignorant boys stumble upon a device which can duplicate money.

Watch the video here

The Mutiphonic Duplicator is the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve is the private (meaning not governmental; meaning owned by private interests) central bank who is solely in charge of setting monetary policy for the United States. They control the interest rates (which are currently about as low as they can go) and currency printing presses. They loan the US Government money (with interest) to fund any spending program or foreign war that our President and Congress desire. This is done simply by entering a number with many zeros into a computer at the Fed which is then transferred to another digital bank account where the funds will then be available for spending. Every time this is done, the currency inflates and every existing dollar drops in value. Through the creation of cheap credit, the Fed has ushered in a century booms and busts (though it was created to prevent such a phenomenon), bank bailouts, and nearly continuous foreign wars. Back to the story…

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Not exactly breaking news, but WorldNetDaily (wnd.com) reported this past spring that a 15 year old Xbox Live gamer logged online only to find a message from Microsoft demanding that he change his controversial gamertag, “mpeach obama21.”

When contacted, a Microsoft rep pointed to this clause in their terms of service, which was supposedly violated:

Don’t create a gamertag, profile content, or in-game content that references controversial religious topics, notorious people, organizations, or sensitive current or historical events that may also be considered inappropriate.

“This name is actually, it’s not likeable,” a Microsoft Xbox LIVE spokesman identifying himself as Jordan said. “If you were Obama, what would you feel if you saw this?”

Boo-freaking-hoo.  One can’t help but see this newest example of censorship as political bias.  Take this portion of their terms of service, for example:

Don’t create a gamertag, profile content, or in-game content that other users may be offended by, this includes comments that look, sound like, stand for, hint at, abbreviate, or insinuate any of the following: profane words/phrases, topics or content of a sexual nature, hate speech (including but not limited to racial, ethnic, or religious slurs), illegal drugs / controlled substances, or illegal activities.

There are countless gamertags, which violate this vulgarity policy, that are allowed to be used with seemingly no peep from Microsoft; ghetto_diarhea, azzwort, Floppydonkeydic, FuhQMsft, urmotherslover, sweaty pubes, URGranniesPantys, ilovedix, and probably the most offensive, JesusIsMyCumRag. (all are actual gamertags)

How Microsoft can offer a statement sticking up for the anti-Obama gamertag ban while the tags listed above are allowed to be used certainly raises some eyebrows.  Surely, we are all for freedom of speech, but we do understand that a privately run company can censor their customers as they see fit. When this censorship, however, seems unfairly balanced, it is only right that companies like Microsoft receive criticism.

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In the days where the government can hide any tax they want inside a 2,000 page piece of legislation, you never know how the next great political activist gets born.  As it turns out, we may have the next Che Guevara on our hands, with Jersey Shore star, Snooki.

Snooki, infamous for her glorious red-orange tan, has recently criticized President Obama’s tanning tax, hidden inside the Orwellian socialized Health Care insurance mandate bill.  The hit MTV show has such a following that her comments were quickly picked up by the mainstream media, such as Politico and DrudgeReport.  She explains why she has resorted to the unreliable method of spray tan:

“I don’t go tanning-tanning anymore because [President] Obama put a 10 percent tax on tanning. … He did that because of us.

A seemingly straight forward statement, but read in between the lines and she’s calling for a revolution!  Let us all march on D.C.!

In all seriousness, she has good reason to be upset.  The government can now tax and regulate anything we put on/in our bodies, and often times they do so by sneaking in a new restriction into a massive bill which has nothing to do with said regulation.

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Remember the time when musicians actually stood for things?  Not like today’s artists, such as Green Day and Incubus, who lambasted the Bush Administration for the wars in the Middle East, who have now gone quiet in criticism of Obama for perpetuating this same wasteful conflict.  Remember when artists celebrated creative individuality as opposed to parroting popular rhetoric, easily accepted by the majority?

One such musician, composer, and individual who proudly marched to the beat of his own drummer was Frank Zappa.  Frank made no apologies to anyone; religious leaders, congress, the average American, feminists, gays, Republicans, Democrats, musicians, and many more.  Pretty much any group whose own special interests were held high upon a pedestal were fair game for Zappa to publicly ostracize.  Not just a musical hero of mine, Frank Zappa embraced individual freedom and fought (sometimes even on Capital Hill) collective group thought; in my eyes his most redeemable qualities.

One such group Zappa disdained above all others were workers unions.  From about the first moment Frank was composing and recording music, unions had been making his life a living hell.  Union representatives for stagehands would threaten to prevent any recording equipment from being switched on until a series of expensive special union fees were met by Zappa.  “I have experienced situations in which union stagehands were paid astonishing amounts of money for doing nothing.  In some instances, they actually degraded the quality of the live shows they were hired to work on.”  The methods that union reps operated on, Zappa said, boarded on “extortion, subjecting touring groups to interpretations of regulations that border on science fiction.”

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Shocker of the year: Band named Gov’t Mule has libertarian roots. Ok, so its almost expected that this southern rock blues band is not flying the flag of socialism, but for a group of guys who have generally kept political issues out of their material, their 2009 release, By a Thread, sheds some light into how they view current American political policy.

One of the hardest working bands in the industry (and one of the best live acts I’ve seen personally), Gov’t Mule hits home their dissatisfaction with current American anti-terrorism policy, the PATRIOT Act.  Mule attacks this horrible piece of legislation in their song ‘Monday Mourning Meltdown’ as “damn deceiving” and lyricist Warren Haynes regrets “believing,” presumably the Act, in the first place.

Indeed, the PATRIOT Act is the single biggest intrusion into our lives and civil liberties infringement in the 21st century.  The government can now legally wiretap your personal phone conversations, enter your home without a warrant, and detain you indefinitely without judicial freedom.  Widely criticized under its Bush-era inception, the PATRIOT Act has since been renewed by President Barack Obama and Democratic majority Federal houses.

The album cover displays the world loosely kept together by a thread, from which a helpless man desperately clings to.  As the world spins towards collective economic collapse, it often feels that if our grip fails, we will fall into the pit of oppression and strife.

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Since I’ve become engulfed in the freedom movement, my liberty senses have been finely attuned to all things which question tyranny.  Whether comments made by people in passing, music, or cinema, I seem to be more receptive to messages which embrace individualism and reject collectivism.

To my pleasure, one of my favorite bands, Spock’s Beard, recently released an album, X, with a great libertarian song, ‘Their Names Escape Me.’  Spock’s Beard is an epic progressive rock band who has been on the music scene for almost two decades.  Their musicianship has always been top notch; blistering guitars, sweeping vocal harmonies, and symphonic arrangements, but their lyrics have always been hit-or-miss.

The Beard’s record label went under before the recording of X and instead of shopping around for a new contract, they decided to take pre-orders from fans for a special edition of the new album while they were recording it.  They used this money to finance the production of their record, and in homage to those who dedicated money to the special edition, Spock’s Beard wrote their names into a song.

Instead of simply dropping some bland names on top of a basic chord progression, they opted for a more creative approach.  The result is ‘Their Names Escape Me,’ which is a Orwellian tale of a dissident being forced to reveal the names of those who have committed treason against the “nation.”

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