Christina Jeffrey for Congress: Fighting to Take American Back!

Christina Jeffrey is running an insurgent libertarian-conservative GOP primary campaign against incumbent "fiscally moderate, socially authoritarian" Bobby Ingless.

She's a self-described "Army brat" brought up in a household that was "Christian, anti-communist, free-enterprise, self-sufficient, loyal Americans."

She also notes in her campaign bio:

Christina attended Vassar College as a freshman, but transferred to a conservative college in Texas where she could study with an outstanding conservative and libertarian faculty.

She's a former College Republican, member of Young Americans for Freedom, and a co-organizer of the Boiling Springs Tea Party.

Further notes on her background:

She has worked in the campaigns of conservatives starting with Barry Goldwater. Most recently she was the campaign manager for Dr. Henry Jordan’s bid for Lt. Governor in 2006. She has never been a paid political operative, but always volunteers and never asks for expense money. In 2008, she fell 123 votes short of election to the legislature. She supports Mark Sanford’s fiscally conservative principles and helped him get elected, just as she did Jim DeMint, and other local conservatives.

Jeffrey recently spoke to a gathering of a local GOP precinct committee in Spartenburg.

Jeffrey stated that she agreed with a member of the audience that "right, first we defund them," Social Security, Medicare and other entitlements.

She later describes her plan for Social Security to "allow people to opt out. Take their money and let them invest it..."

Campaign website: ChristinaJeffrey.com

NANNY-STATE WATCH

NY legislators need to "protect people from themselves"

Alan S. Chartock, president and CEO of WAMC radio in upstate New York, has a column in the Troy Record, "Legislature should tax soda." Chartock sees the tax as a way to close New York's widening budget gap, and have some constructive social engineering. He writes:

We know that obesity is rampant in this country and sugar use by Americans is off the charts. But we don’t tax sugar-laden soda, even though our heath commissioner tells us that this is the time to do just that... The unpopular (but often right) Gov. David Paterson is in favor of the tax on soft drinks.

Chartock then admits that the working class will be hit the hardest, precisely the targetted constituency of the Democrat Party.

Continuing:

There is a current libertarian streak running through this country. People know that every time you put a tax on a popular product like soda, the little people are expected to pay more than their share. The economists call this a regressive tax and it is. Health Commissioner Richard Daines is wildly in favor of the tax. He feels that it will save lives and believes that just as the tax on cigarettes has helped cut down on the consumption of that killer product, the same thing will happen when taxes drive the price of a soda up.

This is a budget crisis year and people distrust the Legislature. As our law-makers look for ways to protect people from themselves, they may want to think about doing the right thing.

The further decline of the endangered Western Democrat

From Eric Dondero:

On Monday, Libertarian Republican reported on the Democrat Party of South Dakota backing off a challenge to incumbent US Senator John Thune. The article: "Thune, smooth cattle ride to Reelection." The Democrats simply could not find a candidate to run against the popular Republican.

Now, further evidence of the Party's serious decline in the upper Central West.

From the Dickinson Press, Bismark April 10, "ND Dems short of candidates for Legislature":

North Dakota Democrats haven't put up challengers for Republican incumbents in Williston, Devils Lake and Bismarck, and may allow seven incumbent GOP state senators to run unopposed for re-election, candidate filings show.

Democratic slates in 24 legislative districts holding elections this fall had a number of holes Friday as the filing deadline passed for North Dakota's June 8 primary.

Democratic candidates are not running for either the House or Senate in District 1, which includes the city of Williston; District 15, which covers Devils Lake, Ramsey County and part of southern Towner County; or District 47 in north Bismarck, one of the state's strongest GOP areas.

In four other districts, Democrats are fielding only one House candidate to compete with two Republicans for each district's two House seats.

In contrast, Republicans failed to come up with a challenger for only one single Democrat-held seat.

Senate Majority Leader Bob Stenehjem, R-Bismarck noted wryle:

"It doesn't look like it will be a good year to run as a Democrat in North Dakota."

AUSTRIAN ECONOMICS

Mises made, in my opinion, the single greatest economic breakthrough of the 20th century. He proved, with irrefutable logic, why socialism is inherently unviable, due to the impossibility of meaningful economic calculation in the absence of market-based prices. -- Mark Hendrickson, Economist

From Eric Dondero:

Another silly romantic comedy from Blockbuster this weekend, or a free market Economics text? Which will leave you feeling cheap, and which will leave you intellectually invigorated?

Mark Hendrickson, an economist who studied under one of the heirs of Ludwig von Mises Dr. Hans Sennholz, offers this list of the best of Von Mises at American Thinker:

In The Theory of Money and Credit (1912), Mises integrated money into the larger body of neoclassical marginalist thought; showed how inflation redistributes, rather than creates wealth; and laid the foundation for his and Hayek's future work on how central bank monetary policy causes the widespread "cluster of errors" that characterizes the boom-bust cycle.

In Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis (1922), Mises made, in my opinion, the single greatest economic breakthrough of the 20th century. He proved, with irrefutable logic, why socialism is inherently unviable, due to the impossibility of meaningful economic calculation in the absence of market-based prices. His socialist critics claimed to have surmounted this difficulty by saying that socialist regimes could copy capitalist prices -- hardly a "triumph" for the alleged superiority of socialism if it is ultimately a parasite dependent on capitalism. Many tens of millions of human beings could have been spared untold grief, blight, poverty, suffering, and premature death in the wretched experiments with socialism that darkened the 20th century, if only Mises's insights and warnings had been heeded.

Mises's magnum opus is Human Action (1949). This book summarizes all of his vast economic understanding and synthesizes it into a comprehensive theory of (what else?) human action, called "praxeology." At a time when economics was becoming so fragmented and specialized that agricultural economists, for example, might have difficulty understanding international trade economists, Mises accomplished the intellectual equivalent of putting Humpty-Dumpty back together again by developing the economic equivalent of the unified theory in physics.

Mises's fourth masterpiece is Theory and History (1957), a surprisingly readable examination of methodology that includes discussions of how both economic theory and the study of history demonstrate the superiority of free-market over government-planned economic action. (This book is the most accessible of "the big four" to the non-economist.)

How to respond to the Obama recession? Atlanta-based radio talk show host, and staunch libertarian Republican Neal Boortz, offers a novel idea: Start the lay-offs with workers who voted for Obama.

Boortz from Twitter:

If Obama is hurting your business ... and you have to lay off someone ... why not lay off an Obama voter? They contributed to your problem.

(H/t Memeo)

Editor's comment - Our friend Neal is being a bit cautious here. Why not take it one step further, and lay-off all registered Democrats first?