Dear Liberty Dispatch

I want to congratulate the local Democratic party. I have lived in Liberty a long time, and with the exception of years ago when hardly anyone would dare to run as a Republican, this was the cleanest I have ever seen them campaign as a party.

Absent a futile effort among the lawyer class to give credence to malicious rumors about one of the Republican candidates, very little of the traditional mixture of using their media friends and their social network to spread lies and half truths was witnessed during the entire election season.

I truly believe one of the reasons for the races being different this time was because some of the candidates, as in past years, would have none of that kind of dirty campaigning. It is a difficult thing to be an incumbent and to have a record that is fair game for anyone that opposes your re-election. But there are always some who run a clean race.

And those Democrats have always been rewarded – until this year. In the past, Democrats in local races have benefited from straight ticket Democratic voting. In fact, in the last fifteen years if the straight ticket voting had been flip flopped, like it was in our local as this year, there would not be one single Democratic officeholder in Liberty County.

There is no coincidence that this year several in the media decided it was a priority to educate voters about straight ticket voting. Noticed as a first was their efforts in this year of all years to make sure local people understood that IF a voter voted straight ticket they could still pick a candidate or two and vote in the other party.

But that was mild and subtle and perhaps unnoticed by many. What should have raised the eyebrows all was the local media’s new found objections to straight ticket voting. Never have they had so much enthusiasm and so many words to express their opposition to “pulling the lever” as some call it. That is not to say they have never given lip service to opposing this practice before, but until it was obvious the Obama factor was going to flip flop the results, they have not preached with near the zeal.

Looking back at this election there seems to me to be two new phenomena that should have made us all approach the election with a fatalistic viewpoint. Local Democrats were doomed from the get-go. First, the excuse we have all heard ad nauseum, Obama is to blame. Hardly a revelation, it finally caught up to local Democrats. When Obama started talking openly about long held goals of the liberals in the Democrat party, Texans ran to the polls to vote against him and his party.

Second, the local media and incumbent politicians knew whatever they said, it would not go unchallenged. In the past, the Democrats have had an unusual advantage. The media would help Democrats’ re-election bid by protecting, or even defending, any reporting of officeholders’ negatives. Not only did they prevent exposing them from defending their record, they helped research and “get the word out” on Republican challengers. This election that tradition ended. Going into the 2010 election season it was obvious Liberty Dispatch was more than willing to, not only talk about incumbents’ records, but to ensure Republicans that the local media would not get the last word.

Those two things made this a very different campaign season. It made it possible to clean up years of the good ole boy system. And a free to speak vigilante press is the only hope of not starting another good ole boy system- with Republicans in the drivers’ seat. If the local media does its job this can’t happen. If they don’t, I have a feeling Liberty Dispatch will.

Obama's People Keeping Flyers Safe for Thanksgiving

An elderly traveler who could barely stand is helped to her feet by a TSA official for a pat-down search at Denver International Airport

Happy Starvation Day!

Had today's political class been in power in 1623, tomorrow's holiday would have been called "Starvation Day" instead of Thanksgiving. Of course, most of us wouldn't be alive to celebrate it.

Every year around this time, schoolchildren are taught about that wonderful day when Pilgrims and Native Americans shared the fruits of the harvest. But the first Thanksgiving in 1623 almost didn't happen.

Long before the failure of modern socialism, the earliest European settlers gave us a dramatic demonstration of the fatal flaws of collectivism. Unfortunately, few Americans today know it.

The Pilgrims at Plymouth Colony organized their farm economy along communal lines. The goal was to share the work and produce equally.

That's why they nearly all starved.

When people can get the same return with less effort, most people make less effort. Plymouth settlers faked illness rather than working the common property. Some even stole, despite their Puritan convictions. Total production was too meager to support the population, and famine resulted. This went on for two years.
"So as it well appeared that famine must still ensue the next year also, if not some way prevented," wrote Gov. William Bradford in his diary. The colonists, he said, "began to think how they might raise as much corn as they could, and obtain a better crop than they had done, that they might not still thus languish in misery. At length after much debate of things, (I) (with the advice of the chiefest among them) gave way that they should set corn every man for his own particular, and in that regard trust to themselves. And so assigned to every family a parcel of land."

In other words, the people of Plymouth moved from socialism to private farming. The results were dramatic.

"This had very good success," Bradford wrote, "for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been. By this time harvest was come, and instead of famine, now God gave them plenty, and the face of things was changed, to the rejoicing of the hearts of many."
Because of the change, the first Thanksgiving could be held in November 1623.

What Plymouth suffered under communalism was what economists today call the tragedy of the commons. The problem has been known since ancient Greece. As Aristotle noted, "That which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it."

If individuals can take from a common pot regardless of how much they put in it, each person has an incentive to be a free-rider, to do as little as possible and take as much as possible because what one fails to take will be taken by someone else. Soon, the pot is empty.

By, John Stossel,  http://www.johnstossel.com/

Ray