Dr. Singer explains how the bad effects of drugs that are currently illegal could be solved, as ending the drug war would reduce the dangers of their use:
LPNY Secretary Andrew Kolstee discusses upcoming plans of the State Committee to deal with current political limitations of the LP, in light of their decision to withdraw Larry Sharpe’s nomination for Governor. See also this discussion on Hardfire from 2024, on the subject of LPNY’s strategy issues in dealing with petitioning problems:
You may be wondering why the Libertarian Party of New York has been silent through the petitioning period this year. This was intentional, and once this year’s process is over in early June, we will elaborate on the decision to be silent, and on the decisions of the State Committee.
The ballot access situation in New York remains extremely difficult. The current requirements continue to place a heavy burden on independent and third-party candidates, especially organizations made up primarily of volunteers. These challenges force us to make hard decisions about where to focus our time and resources.
The Executive Committee has discussed several ideas for moving the Libertarian Party of New York in a different direction. We know what has worked, we know what has not worked, and we recognize that continuing to operate the same way is not sustainable under the current system.
We are currently working on a campaign that will be announced shortly. This effort is intended to help move the party forward while recognizing the practical limitations we face as a volunteer organization....More
Amazon tycoon Jeff Bezos rants on CNBC about how Queens nurses pay too much in taxes, compared to billionaires like him, who he says should be taxed more. But isn’t rooting for the progressive income tax exactly how the middle class got heavy taxation burdens misapplied to them in the first place? And don’t fat cats like him avoid being on a payroll, as they live off their assets and corporate revenue, so they aren’t even subject to income taxes? Doesn’t the IRS legalized theft system show it’s wrong to take wealth away from productive people of any class?:
“When you don’t know how to solve a problem, create a villain, blame them, but it won’t solve the problem,” Bezos said, referring to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s pied-à-terre tax proposal. The idea would generate between $340 to $510 million in annual revenue, according to City Comptroller Mark Levine.
Bezos also floated the idea of low-income earners paying nothing in individual income tax, which is already the case for about 40 percent of American households (many of which are low-income), according to a 2025 report from the Tax Policy Center.
The U.S. tax system is highly progressive. The top 10 percent of earners—households earning more than $228,000—take home 45.7 percent of all income but pay 61.3 percent of all federal taxes, according to the latest available data from the U.S. Treasury. In contrast, the bottom 50 percent of earners collectively pay very little, with the lowest income groups actually receiving more in credits than they pay in taxes.
When progressive politicians talk about an unfair tax system, they’re ostensibly referencing the difference between one’s effective and statutory tax rates. With exemptions, deductions, and credits unequally distributed—even amongst taxpayers with similar incomes—tax liability often boils down to which provision a filer qualifies for.
Differing tax rates for capital gains, business profits, mortgage interest, and family size mean that those at either end of the statutory rate can end up with a higher effective tax rate than others in their tax bracket. Taxes such as the estate tax, gift tax, and payroll and corporate taxes are also paid almost entirely by the wealthy, who are more likely to have non-wage income. At the same time, policies like the Child Tax Credit and the Earned Income Tax Credit favor low- and middle-income families.
Bezos is right when he says higher taxes on the rich won’t solve the affordability crisis; more revenue for the government doesn’t mean wiser spending… More
Zo closes the city’s $12 billion deficit in the new budget through a variety of fiscal force measures, as per the below City Journal summary. How about our big government guy do so mainly by cutting spending, unneeded programs, laws and regulations, or eliminating legalized tax theft, along with encouraging voluntary business enterprise to return to NYC? Inconceivable:
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani took a victory lap around the City Hall rooftop with the release of his proposed balanced budget for fiscal year 2027, which begins on July 1. He’s closed a $12 billion funding gap he inherited on taking office, he claims, without resorting to the dreaded austerity measures supposedly demanded by budget grumps who, unlike him, want to harm “working people” and benefit the wealthy.
Balancing the budget is, of course, the mayor’s job, by law. Mamdani deserves credit for submitting a credible financial plan. Despite his inexperience, he has mastered the process and successfully worked with the governor and the legislature to get the budget relief he needed. But his plan is good for just one year. If he had listened more to the budget critics, less trouble would be in store for the future. Depending on unfolding events, many beyond his control, working people may still find their benefits under serious strain.
The mayor closed the funding gap in two phases. In his preliminary budget, last February, he included $6.6 billion in additional tax revenue over fiscal years 2026 and 2027, and $1.5 billion in state aid promised by Governor Kathy Hochul. That closed most of the gap, but Mamdani also included $1.77 billion in projected agency savings, drew down reserves, and proposed a $3.7 billion property tax increase.
The property tax hike was in lieu of the mayor’s desired increase in personal and business income taxes, which required state legislation that the governor opposed. That ploy was received coldly by the city council, and the mayor has now dropped it. Commentators also criticized drawing down the city’s already inadequate reserves. So Mamdani went back to the drawing board for the May executive budget… Read the Rest
Scheerpost blog discusses the Doomsday Debt problem from the point of view of what to do about job losses brought about by the AI explosion:
…A Universal Basic Income (UBI) has long been proposed as a way to cushion the blow of jobs lost to automation. Under that model, everyone receives a modest monthly payment – enough to cover basic needs and prevent extreme poverty.
But Elon Musk has gone further. On April 16, he posted on X:
Universal HIGH INCOME via checks issued by the Federal government is the best way to deal with unemployment caused by AI.
AI/robotics will produce goods & services far in excess of the increase in the money
supply, so there will not be inflation.
Rather than a subsistence stipend, Universal High Income (UHI) would be a level of income allowing ordinary people to live well in a world where machines do most of the work. Musk has also said that AI and robotics are the only things that can solve the massive U.S. debt crisis.
That sounds promising, but where will the government get the money to pay the UHI? Critics say any government that tried it would go bankrupt. There are also other concerns, which will be addressed in Part 2 of this article. Here we will look at the financial underpinnings: why UHI is even thinkable, why AI forces a reexamination of how money enters the economy, why the current system cannot scale to meet what is coming, and the implicit transition needed to meet that challenge.
Why the Current Money System Cannot Scale
The national debt of the U.S. government just topped $39 trillion. China’s is $18.7 trillion. Japan’s is $8.6 trillion. Those of the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain are each in the multi-trillion-dollar range. Collective global debt now stands at $353 trillion, 305% of the world’s annual economic output. So even if, hypothetically, everything produced in the world in a year were applied toward liquidating the debt, it still would not be enough to pay it all off.
In fact the debt can never be repaid, because of the way money currently enters the system. Nearly all of the money supply today is created by banks when they make loans. Banks do not lend their existing capital. The loan itself creates the money. The bank adds the loan amount to the asset side of its balance sheet and balances that sum with the same amount on the liability side. When the borrower withdraws or transfers the funds, either the bank takes them from its reserves in “vault cash” or the Federal Reserve debits the bank’s digital reserve account at the central bank. But the lending bank typically has funds coming into its reserve account at about the same rate as they are going out, so its reserves are continually replenished. Thus a very small reserve account can support a much larger money creation engine. For decades before the Fed discontinued the reserve requirement in 2020, it hovered at around 10%.
The chief problem with this debt-based system is the interest, which the bank does not create in its original loan. For a typical long-term loan, interest can double the total tab or more. Where is the money to come from to pay this added liability? Across the system as a whole, it must either come from more borrowing or from existing funds. In the case of governments, that means issuing interest-bearing bonds or tapping taxes and other revenues. The interest on the debt compounds, meaning the government is paying interest on interest. This makes the debt increase exponentially, until it is mathematically unsustainable. Then bankruptcies occur, of banks or even whole governments. Booms turn into busts, and the cycle begins again.
Today, interest on the federal debt is the second largest budget line item after Social Security, exceeding $1 trillion. Meanwhile, workers are losing jobs to AI/robotics, shrinking the income tax base. The system is clearly unsustainable… Read More
Join us for QL’s Mother’s Day weekend meeting as the Libertarian Party of Queens County (LPQC) on May 9 at noon. It will be held will be held at our Astoria location, Stamatis Greek and Mediterranean Restaurant at 29-09 23rd Avenue (in the back area, menu details at stamatisrestaurant.net). This official LP county committee function will serve as a full general meeting, in anticipation of the upcoming LP National Convention.
We hope to have an update by Larry Sharpe or a representative about the progress of his campaign for Governor, and the LPNY candidate situation. New candidates for office are given an opportunity to announce their interest in running and meet and greet those attending. We also expect to give a tribute to longtime Queens activist John Clifton, who will also discuss solutions to current party issues and circumstances.
Attendees are asked to pay/renew dues of $20 to LPQC by or during the proceedings in order to vote. In this session members will again be offered to serve as LPQC officers, and as key persons or “team members” for the following positions: media contact, membership/fundraising, candidate/activist outreach, youth/campus outreach, community/business outreach. Please attend, and volunteer to help in one of these areas! Hope to see you there!
Reason’s Damon Root (who used to interview LPNY candidates at Columbia University back in the day) on the Supreme Court case that evaluates the privacy violations implicated by the use of “geo-fencing” (police getting mass digital location info of cell phone users):
…At issue in Chatrie v. United States is a law enforcement tool known as a “geofence warrant.” In this case, the police told Google to search the location histories of every one of its users in order to determine which users were present in the vicinity of a bank robbery.
Adam Unikowsky, the lawyer for Okello Chatrie, whose conviction stemmed from that geofence warrant, told the justices that the government’s tactics should be viewed as an illegal “general warrant,” the sort of all-compassing search that the Fourth Amendment was originally written to prevent. “There was not probable cause to search the virtual private papers of every single person within the geofence merely because of their proximity to the crime,” he argued.
By contrast, Deputy Solicitor General Eric Feigin told the justices that Chatrie’s position, if adopted, would result in an “unprecedented transformation of the Fourth Amendment into an impregnable fortress around records of his public movements that he affirmatively consented to allow Google to create, maintain, and use.” Read More
The Iran situation, and the sad reversal of Trump on the subject of getting mired in foreign conflicts is noted by our party’s national Chair. The comments (from a donation message) are quoted in full, as this “one week war” is clearly spiraling into a crisis that will damage our entire economy this year. It’s not just an idle intellectual issue anymore, as it seems the chickens of fiscal and militarist insanity are coming home to roost:
Donald Trump returned to office promising strength, restraint, and relief. He promised to put America first. He promised to avoid new wars. He promised to lower costs, tame inflation, and focus Washington back on the American people. He delivered another Middle East war, another foreign policy disaster sold on fantasy, and another crisis whose costs will be paid by ordinary Americans.
The irony is obvious. The man who ran as a repudiation of Bush-era interventionism revived its logic and marched us back into the same swamp under a different banner.
Years ago, Bob Woodward’s Plan of Attack revealed that George W. Bush cited the threat to Israel as part of the rationale for invading Iraq. Saddam Hussein, he warned, could strike Israel and trigger a wider international conflict. That logic survived Iraq. It survived the lies, the dead, and the wreckage. It returned, rebranded and repackaged in the language of urgency and necessity.
Trump sought regime change in Iran. He said so. In the video announcing the attack, he spoke like a man opening a political overthrow, telling the Iranian people that when we are finished, they should take over their government, that it would be theirs to take, and that this might be their only chance for generations. It was regime change language. It was the language of decapitation followed by hoped-for collapse.
The opening blow matched it. Israeli reporting described a surprise daylight strike on the Supreme Leader’s compound in Tehran, reportedly killing him along with senior political and security officials. The Iranian regime is authoritarian, corrupt, and hostile. That was never the question. The question was whether decapitating it would produce the outcome Trump and Netanyahu imagined.
By all available reporting, it would not. The administration had reason to know that. A week before the attack, the National Intelligence Council reportedly concluded that even a major American operation would not topple the regime. Reuters reported that the CIA assessed that if the Supreme Leader were assassinated, he would likely be replaced quickly by harder-line Revolutionary Guard elements. That appears to be exactly what happened.
It was a failure of judgment. The intelligence was there. The warnings were there. The administration chose fantasy anyway.
Then came the scramble. Cabinet officials began sanding down the language. Suddenly the war had narrower aims. Suddenly the objective was only nuclear rollback, only deterrence, only strategic degradation. Trump briefly shifted to safer ground, talking about preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. Days later, he returned to demanding unconditional surrender and the selection of a “great and acceptable leader.” Pete Hegseth later suggested regime change had already occurred. Marco Rubio tried to square the circle, denying regime change as an objective while welcoming it as an outcome.
The story lurched because reality had begun tearing at the sales pitch.
Rubio also revealed something more damning at the outset. He admitted the administration knew Israel intended to strike Iran and understood that such an attack would likely bring retaliation against the United States. America joined a war because Washington knew another government was about to light the fuse and decided it had better jump in.
It is entanglement. It is subordination of American policy to another government’s timetable. It is a direct betrayal of what voters were promised.
And those assumptions were sold hard. Israeli officials later indicated the operation had been planned months in advance. Reuters reported that regime change was one of Netanyahu’s arguments in the final call before Trump gave the order. Other reporting described Netanyahu briefing Trump’s team directly in the White House Situation Room, promising that Iran’s missile program could be broken quickly, that the regime would be too weak to close the Strait of Hormuz, that retaliation against American interests would be minimal, and that internal unrest inside Iran could help finish the job.
It was the same old pitch. Easy war. Fast collapse. Limited blowback. A brittle regime ready to shatter after one decisive strike.
We have seen this before. Iraq. Libya. Syria. The map is always simple in the briefing room. Reality is always more expensive.
And according to multiple reports, people around Trump knew better. J.D. Vance, who once spoke clearly about the folly of stupid wars and the burden they place on young Americans, reportedly had serious reservations. General Dan Caine reportedly warned that the Israelis were overselling the ease and speed of the operation. Intelligence professionals reportedly rejected the regime change scenario as unrealistic. Even Rubio, by some accounts, understood that the pitch was nonsense.
Trump went anyway.
Despite intelligence to the contrary, Trump plunged headlong into another Middle East war. This was a war of choice. It was entered despite warnings. It was sold on fantasy. It is now being justified after the fact with contradiction, drift, and rhetorical smoke.
There was no quick collapse. There was no neat uprising. There was no clean political transition. Iran responded as weaker states do. It fought asymmetrically. It struck where it could cause the most damage. Missiles and drones targeted bases and cities. Shipping lanes were harassed. Proxies activated. The broader regional escalation that had been minimized or dismissed materialized anyway.
Trump reportedly believed Iran would cave before it closed the Strait of Hormuz. The world got an energy shock of historic proportions instead. By some assessments, the disruption now unfolding could exceed the shocks of 1973, 1979, and 2022 combined.
That is where this war stops being a foreign policy abstraction and starts landing squarely at home.
Trump won in no small part by promising relief from inflation and economic disorder. He promised lower costs, more stability, and a government focused on Americans rather than foreign adventurism. By choosing this war, he helped trigger the opposite. Fuel prices were only the first tremor. The bigger shock is still moving through the system. The last tankers that cleared Hormuz before closure are still arriving.
After that, reserves tighten, supply chains strain, and the effects spread through shipping, consumer prices, industrial inputs, utilities, airfare, and food.
Reopening the Strait tomorrow would not fix it. Major infrastructure in the Gulf has been damaged. LNG capacity has been disrupted. Production elsewhere has been curtailed. Storage and export systems do not snap back on command. Wells cannot be turned back on like a light switch. Restoration takes months. In some cases, years.
That means the pain does not end with a headline. It moves through the bloodstream of the economy. Fuel. Freight. Fertilizer. Food. Utilities. Credit. Everything touched by energy, which is to say everything.
This is the deeper betrayal.
Trump railed against high interest rates, against the Federal Reserve, against the rising cost of living. He wanted lower rates, stronger growth, and economic relief. By launching this war, he helped reinforce the exact conditions that make relief harder to deliver. War inflation. Supply shocks. Strategic uncertainty. Rising energy costs. A population already worn down by years of inflation is now being asked to absorb another blow because the administration chose to chase a regime change fantasy its own intelligence did not support.
Promises made. Promises broken.
He promised no more stupid wars. Now we are in one.
He promised America First. American power has been yoked to another state’s strategic gamble.
He promised competence. He ignored warnings from intelligence and senior officials who understood the operation was being oversold.
He promised prosperity. He helped unleash a crisis that will make daily life more expensive for the very people who put him back in office.
He promised realism. He embraced delusion.
Nor has he achieved what he appears to have set out to do. On regime change, he failed. On missiles, reporting suggests Iran retains significant launch capability, much of it hardened and buried precisely for this kind of conflict. On the broader regional front, the threat network remains. Hezbollah, despite years of damage and repeated boasts of its demise, appears far from gone. Washington and Tel Aviv once again believed they could bomb away the region’s political and military realities. The region answered back.
Even in Israel, confidence in the outcome has reportedly been weak. That should tell us something. This war was sold as decisive. It pushed the region further toward permanent confrontation, territorial seizure, and long-war management, another forever war in the long roll call of American interventionism.
And who pays for that?
Not the men who sell it on late-night television.
Not the think tank war priests.
Not the consultants, contractors, or foreign policy careerists who move between cable news, government posts, and defense boards.
The American people pay for it.
The family paying more at the pump.
The worker whose wages never quite catch up.
The borrower trapped by higher rates.
The small business hit by higher freight and input costs.
The young man who may yet be asked to carry the burden of someone else’s grand strategy.
Libertarians should have no trouble saying this plainly. One does not need to admire the Iranian regime to oppose this war. One does not need to pretend the mullahs are good in order to see that Washington was reckless, gullible, captured, or some combination of all three. The first duty of an American administration is to the liberty, life, and prosperity of the American people. That duty was discarded here in favor of regime change fantasy, foreign pressure, and interventionist delusion.
That is the real indictment.
Trump was handed an opportunity to break from the old pattern. He was elected in part because millions of Americans were tired of being lied to by the war crowd, tired of subsidizing empire, tired of watching Washington serve everyone except the people who actually live here.
He revived the pattern. He embodied the swamp he claimed he would drain.
He ran against Bushism and adopted its logic.
He ran against the deep state and empowered it.
He ran on relief for Americans and handed them another bill, paid in debt, inflation, and blood.
Promises made. Promises broken.
Chase Oliver, our Libertarian presidential nominee said it best in his acceptance speech: end the genocide, ceasefire now, and support peace around the world.
The Libertarian position is clear. War does not serve the American people, especially a war as aimless, escalatory, and stupid as the one we now find ourselves in.
We will continue to stand with the American people against war. Stand with us.
Donate Today!
Sincerely,
Steven Nekhaila
Chairman, LNC