Update, 03/19/10: Tap … tap … is the ChipIn meter broken? Nope. It’s stuck at $310, and we’re stuck at $365 in “Spring Fling” contributions toward our $1,000 goal. We did have a monthly “subscribing contributor” payment from long-time supporter DD, who also kicked in $100 for “Spring Fling” — thanks as always for your support, DD! — but on this short, reasonable-goal fundraiser, we are dead in the water.

Folks, the quicker we get to $1,000, the quicker I can stop hectoring you. We’re coming up on 7 1/2 years of reliably bringing you the freedom movement’s daily newspaper; we need you to support it if you want it to be around for another 7 1/2 years. Please, click the ChipIn meter, or one of the “donate” buttons in the sidebar of most pages at rationalreview.com, and return a little value for value received - TLK

We’ve been avoiding the “in your face” fundraising for awhile (since early last fall, in fact) but it’s time for a bump. For the last few months, our part-time editors have been taking home less than $100 a month; I’ve been working nearly full time for less than $200 a month.

I’ll keep this short, sharp and sweet:

Our goal is $1,000 in two weeks — that’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 15-20 cents per reader — after which we’ll revert to the more passive fundraising approach again. Please return value for value to the people who bring you the freedom movement’s daily newspaper.

Yours in liberty,
Tom Knapp
Publisher
Rational Review

Our latest (and most welcome) addition is a group blog, On ALLiance. The “ALL” in the title refers to the Alliance of the Libertarian Left. ALL isn’t a formal organization, but rather a “multi-tendency coalition” — see the link for more details.

On ALLiance is edited/administered by Chris Lempa, with a mix of other left-libertarian authors weighing in. Check it out!

Thanks to all who bid on the ad space!

Now, however, there’s going to be a lot more action elsewhere on the site. Starting with three names you’ll almost certainly recognize, we’re setting up as a blog home for prominent libertarian authors who’d just as soon leave the admin stuff to someone else. They get web space, a content management “back end,” and someone they actually know to yell at if things don’t work properly. We take a small piece of screen real estate for advertising. Win-win deal!

Earlier this year, L. Neil Smith opened The Moratorium. He’s blogged a few excellent pieces there, and plans to get back to it after November (which he’ll spend on NANOWRIMO).

As of last week, Tibor R. Machan is blogging at A Passion for Liberty.

And as of this morning, J. Neil Schulman is publishing at J. Neil Schulman @ Rational Review.

These authors aren’t writing “for” Rational Review — they have their own independent blogs “@” Rational Review and enjoy complete editorial and artistic freedom. And that’s just the way we like it; we’re exchanging value for value with the authors, and bringing new value to what we offer our (and their) readers. Enjoy, and look for new names in the “@ Rational Review” blogosphere in the near future.

Best regards,
Tom Knapp
Publisher
Rational Review

If you resemble that remark — if you’ve ever sent us money, that’s you — and would like to participate, please apply to join the Virtual Evenings email list here (we don’t automatically sign up contributors — they may not be interested in the events and they may not want the email!). The only email messages you’ll receive from this list will be event announcements with access details … a message or two a month.

If you don’t resemble that remark, see the right sidebar of this page and consider making a one-time contribution or becoming one of our “subscribing contributors” with a monthly payment. That’s what makes it possible for us to publish “the freedom movement’s daily newspaper.”

So, what’s a “Virtual Evening?” It’s actually “A Virtual Evening with [insert name here].” That name will be a libertarian/freedom movement person or persons whom we believe our readers and supporters would like the chance to listen to and speak with. A Rational Review editor will act as emcee, introducing the keynote speaker/honored guest, who will deliver a brief speech, presentation or opening statement. Then the “floor” will be opened up for questions, comments and discussion. We’ll ask our honored guests to make themselves available for least 60-90 minutes for their “Virtual Evenings,” but if they can stay longer and if the participants want to keep things going, that’s fine too.

The first “Virtual Evening” events will be held by teleconference, starting in November or December of 2009, at a rate of one or two events per month. In the future, we may add video and Internet chat capabilities as well. Enjoy!

Yours in liberty,
Tom Knapp
Publisher
Rational Review

The Libertarian Press Club will conduct events — telephone-based “virtual press conferences,” for example — to bring libertarian journalists, bloggers, podcasters, etc. together with newsworthy “freedom movement” people and projects. Check it out!

The next two projects should be interesting as well. One is a general “activism facilitation” project, the other is a premium/gift to Rational Review News Digest / Freedom News Daily’s financial supporters. They’re both on the way, Real Soon Now.

Update, 10/01/09: Thanks to subscribing contributor HW, whose $5 monthly payment arrived yesterday. Also SPECIAL thanks to KAW, who first suggested the phrase “returning value for value to me.” She does so on a monthly basis as one of our subscribing contributors, too, and added an extra $10 right after the ChipIn widget went dead, “officially” ending this fundraiser. Finally, thanks to HH and RW, who got their contributions in before the widget said “closed.”

Our actual final total (barring any checks that are on their way) is $1,806.32, which is more than the ChipIn gadget says, since some payments arrived by other routes.

So, first, the bad news:

When we started this fundraiser, we played the “going out of business card” for the first and hopefully last time in our history. Specifically, I wrote:

Will RRND/FND blink out of existence on October 1st if we don’t make our goal? No. But unless we receive a substantial infusion of money in the next two weeks, I will go to my fellow editors and propose that we start winding it down, with an eye toward ceasing publication at the end of the year.

The good news:

I will be going to my fellow editors with several ideas, but at this time none of them involve shutting down RRND/FND.

While we didn’t make our goal, or even come close, there was “a substantial infusion of cash” both into RRND/FND and — from other sources — into my personal/family situation.

We’re also entertaining a tentative offer from a new entrant into our very market niche. Not exactly a buy-out, but a possibly lucrative arrangement which would enable us to bring in more money for the work we already do, without running constant fundraisers to scrape by.

So, not only can we keep going, my fellow editors have already told me that they want to keep going, and I agree. While the percentage of RRND/FND readers returning value for value is still low, it’s growing; and our long-time supporters continue to be there for us. I enjoy my job, and I prefer to honor our past and present supporters by continuing at that job for as long as I can possibly justify doing so financially.

So: RRND/FND will continue at least through the end of the year, and quite likely beyond that. There won’t be any more “daily fundraising pitches” until January 1st or after.

I will, however, create a new Chip-In with a goal of $5,193.68 (the portion of our $7k goal not yet raised) and run it in the sidebar and as a “sponsor ad” in our email editions through the end of the year. You won’t hear about it day in and day out, but we’ll certainly appreciate it if our readers put a ding in the amount, which represents, more or less, a “deficit” in our assessment of what constitutes a reasonable return on our investment of time and effort.

Yours in liberty,
Tom Knapp
Publisher
Rational Review

If you’re looking for me to put the Holocaust of European Jewry or Jihadis being responsible for 9/11 on this list, look elsewhere.

I’m 56 years old, born in April 1953. So I’m limiting myself to Big Lies present in my own lifetime.

Here we go, not in any chronological order.

(more…)

Isn’t it bad enough that Barack Obama wants to force healthy people to buy health insurance to subsidize the coverage to people with pre-existing conditions the insurance companies will be forced by law to give? That’s a straight socialist wealth transfer scheme — and fascistic to boot, since for the first time ever it requires people to buy a commercial product or face government punishment. And the forced auto liability insurance argument isn’t accurate; nobody is forced by law to drive or own a car. They could ride with friends or take the bus. How do you decline forced health insurance — kill yourself?

That this is evil and contrary to American values of independence — and unconstitutional to boot — is getting far less coverage on blogs, talk radio, and Fox News than all these distractions about Obama lying, whether Joe Wilson should apologize, and whether the roots are grass or astroturf.

Update, 07/01/09: Thanks to HW, who became final new subscribing contributor to sign on during this drive! HW’s $5/month commitment brings our total recurring revenues to $412.50 against our goal of $2000 (I’ve been accidentally misreporting our numbers $5 to the low side for several days, and just caught it on the wrap-up).

This drive is now OVER, which means you’ll stop seeing daily updates, etc. Thanks to everyone who supports the freedom movement’s daily newspaper!

Here’s what comes next:

- Because we didn’t reach our goal of $2000 per month in recurring revenues, we’ll continue to run lower-impact monthly fundraisers in an attempt to make up the difference between what’s coming in and what we’re trying to bring in. Our July goal is $1587. You can see our progress (and click through to help) at rationalreview.chipin.com.

- We’ll also be focusing on how increasing advertising revenues. This may mean that you see more ads, or that those ads are more prominently placed. Once we get those ad revenues up to $100 per month, we’ll start reducing our fundraising goals by the previous month’s ad revenues.

Thanks again to all of you who continue to support RRND/FND! - TLK

—–

Dear readers,

As promised, I’ve tried to keep RRND/FND’s fundraising activities “low visibility, low pressure” for the last few months. I was even hoping to push this particular fundraiser farther down the road, but recent events have forced my hand. If my smooth sales pitch has already sold you, click here to skip the dirty details and go directly to the part where you send us money.

The dirty details

Since late 2004, Rational Review News Digest has “re-branded” itself as Freedom News Daily for a separate audience, on behalf of the International Society for Individual Liberty. We intend to continue doing so.

Since some time in 2005, ISIL has paid us — to the tune of $1,000 a month — to produce FND. Due to its own financial requirements and fundraising imperatives, ISIL has had to at least temporarily cease that support.

Repeat after me three times: This is not a divorce. It’s not even a breakup. We remain on good terms with ISIL. We intend to continue serving up daily helpings of Freedom News Daily to ISIL’s web, email and Facebook readers.

But, as you can see, this puts a big dent in our already very understated revenue model. Here’s how it breaks down:

Our current revenue model calls for us to bring in $2,000 a month. Before transaction fees, web hosting, etc., that would come to $720 per month in pay for our one full-time staffer (me), $360 per month for our three part-time editors (R. Lee Wrights, Mary Lou Seymour and Steve Trinward), and $200 per month for our tech support guy (Brad Spangler). As you can see, we’re not in this to get rich. But, as I’ve mentioned before, we have to eat.

Of course, we generally don’t bring in $2,000 a month. Until lately, we brought in $1,000 a month from ISIL, $237.50 per month (as of right now) in recurring payments from our beloved “subscribing donors,” an average of, oh, $25 per month in advertising commissions, and whatever else people send in “one-time” or “occasional” payments that aren’t tied to our “subscribing donor” system (another amount that fluctuates). On average, call it $1300-1500 per month — total.

That amount just went down to $300-500 per month with the ISIL developments. Time to get it back up, and moreover on a reliable basis. That means increasing our number of “subscribing contributors” … those of you who are willing to commit to sending $2.50, $5.00, $10, or $20 every month.

Goal: Get our “subscribing contributor” number from $237.50 per month to $2,000 per month by the end of June.

Does that sound hard? It shouldn’t. Our total readership via email, Facebook, MySpace and Twitter comes to nearly 7,100 readers. That’s excluding web edition readers. RRND’s web statistics say we exceed 2,000 unique visitors per day; I don’t have stats for ISIL’s web edition of FND.

I could make a good case for there being 10,000 daily consumers of this newsletter. Even excluding all duplicates, I think it’s a fair bet that we’re talking about more than 5,000 daily readers. If only 705 of you were to sign up at our $2.50 per month level, we’d be there.

So, I’m going to drag out the dreaded “thermometer” graphic and start hectoring you on a daily basis to get us there. Sound familiar? Let’s not have another one of those six-month ordeals.

The sweetener is this: If we can make this goal and stay within shouting distance of it (e.g. we don’t drop down below, say, $1,800 per month in “subscribing contributor” revenues), we’ll be content to do a short (probably one week long) “push it up a little” fundraiser once a year instead of coming back at you again and again with short-term goals that end up taking months to meet.

[Note: I’ve moved the thermometer graphic “up top”]

And here’s where you click to make things happen:

The Buck Starts Here Club ($1/month, billed quarterly)
RRND Daily Reader ($2.50/month)	RRND Subscriber ($5.00/month)
RRND Supporter ($10/month)	RRND Patron ($20/month)

I’ll be back with daily updates and neat little factoids (”our lowest subscribing donor level costs less than a large iced white chocolate mocha latte at Starbucks^TM” and such) … when you get tired of seeing them, you know where to click.

Yours in liberty,
Tom Knapp
Publisher
Rational Review

Over time, we’ve tried to make it easy to contribute to RRND/FND in an automatic/recurring way, with optional levels ranging from $2.50 per month to $20 per month.

There’s a reason for the lowest level being $2.50 instead of, say, $1.00: PayPal charges transaction fees of 30 cents plus a small percentage of the total. From a $1.00 payment, less than 70 cents would actually reach RRND.

However, I’ve always wanted to offer a $1.00 per month level.

PayPal’s subscription function got more flexible awhile back — or maybe it’s always been that way and I just missed it until recently — and by George, I think I’ve got it.

Welcome, Ladies and Gents, to the miracle science of quarterly billing! Our new level of recurring support — The Buck Starts Here Club — lets you support RRND/FND to the tune of one dollar per month without transaction fees eating up more than 30% of that dollar before it ever reaches us.

The long and short of it is $3, billed every three months. I’ve already added this level to our standard “subscribing contributor options” menu, but here it is a la carte for your convenience.

This level of support is recommended for those who:

- Value RRND/FND at one dollar a month; and/or

- Can only afford one dollar a month; and/or

- Can’t, or prefer not to, fork over $12 in one swell foop.

Thanks, of course, to all of you who financially support the freedom movement’s daily newspaper at any level or frequency. We’ll continue to look into new and more convenient options to encourage that support.

Yours in liberty, Tom Knapp
Publisher
Rational Review

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world”

–William Butler Yeats

I’m an anarchist. I’m supposed to be opposed to authority; but really, the commitment only requires me to oppose the State, because it is coercive.

What of the authority of words then? It’s been pointed out to me that unlike the French I owe no allegiance to a government bureau that decides “Le Car” is a bastardization of their language, or forbids the naming of children unless the name appears on an officially sanctioned list.

I opened this comment with a quotation from Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming” but I just as easily could have begun with a quote from Lewis Carroll: “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”

And we are behind the looking glass, my friends. When no common agreement can be reached on what a word means, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world — and I don’t mean anarchism, which is a self-organizing system seeking a natural order. I mean the inability to communicate through language because words have no fixed meaning thus there is no longer the possibility of reasoned discussion, only of spin and propaganda.

(more…)

Maher points his weapon — in this case a movie camera instead of an M-16 — in the general direction he thinks the enemy is then fires wildly. The problem is that as a documentarian Bill Maher ignores both weapons safety procedures and military rules of engagement. Bill Maher fails to correctly identify his targets before he puts his finger on the trigger and fires. So while he can be scored for some direct hits, he both creates a lot of collateral damage and leaves half the real enemy unscathed.

(more…)

And because we grew up in a time that seemed to be trying to straddle the line between the puritanical fifties and the upheaval of the seventies, it isn’t hard to pinpoint exact moments in time with amazing clarity (given the fact that these days I’m doing good to remember where I put my glasses). (more…)

That the core concept of statism is inherently unjust is not in question. Nor is the notion that the voting is unlikely to produce an acceptable level of reform. To this extent, anarchists generally agree.

What separates anti-political libertarians from principled partyarchs is the advocacy of a vulgar form of unilateral disarmament.^* This form of pacifism is more in line with the LeFevrian stripe than in the simpler sense, in that the anarchist is more concerned with becoming part of the problem than with straightforward avoidance. But it still walks and talks like pacifism. This willful disassociation from tactics used by statists is as doomed to catch fire as was Quakerism. (more…)

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

According to many Constitutional scholars, this amendment was intended to highlight the fact that while the original 13 States were one independent nation, this new nation was comprised of 13 independent and sovereign entities, capable of creating legislation pertinent to their particular areas that were not expressly delegated to Congress by the other articles contained in the Bill of Rights.

(This of course is leaving aside the argument that the War Between the States did away with the sovereignty of the states by asserting that the South had no right to leave the Union — there are opinions aplenty concerning this issue.)

That was then — and in the generations since, state governments have historically ignored the 10th amendment in order to feed at the federal trough. Entire political dynasties and multi-generational careers have been made on the basis of how many federal dollars could be funneled to the states’ coffers from dear old Uncle Sam.

(more…)

My old friend Samuel Edward Konkin III would rise from his grave to haunt me if I were to deliver a State of the Movement address so this address is guaranteed to be state-free. But movements presumably move in one direction or another so my very personal report on This Movement of Ours is My Movement of the Movement Address.

(more…)

Why am I always in the minority when it comes to public opinion? You’d think the law of averages would occasionally work in my favor and I’d check the local news website’s latest poll or comment section and find this:

“CUTE KITTENS — fer ‘em or agin ‘em?”

Oh, easy. *clicks fer ‘em*

But oh, hell no.

The local newspaper and television has been abuzz with articles concerning the tobacco tax hike and the possible benefits to society as a whole. By far the vast majority of comments run along these lines:

“Ewww, smokers are totally gross so it’s totally kewl to tax the crap out of them so they quit and don’t bother me. OMG! I’m so texting all my BFFs on Twitter right now and they so agree with me. Totally.”

“Harrumph! Smokers cost me and the boys down at the country club bazillions of dollars in health care taxes. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to the 19th Hole to enjoy a bourbon and branchwater. Cheers. Harrumph!”

Do you see what I did there? I personally don’t own a cell phone or drink … so I have zero problem with demonizing people who do! It’s so easy a caveman can do it!

“But won’t someone think of the CHILDREN!!!!!!!!!”

Okay, let’s think of the children. (more…)

Of course, that doesn’t mean you can’t help us promote Rational Review’s tweets anyway! Feel free to let your friends know that they can get the latest news and commentary via Twitter by following user rationalreview.

Usually, that is — this week the mechanism we’ve been using to “automatically” port our stories to Twitter hasn’t been especially reliable. I’m looking into other ways of getting the stuff from point A to point B, and may switch to manually doing so if necessary.

Regards,
Tom Knapp
Publisher
Rational Review

Moral Hazard a risk that somebody will behave immorally because insurance, the law, or some other agency protects them against loss that the immoral behavior might otherwise cause. http://dictionary.bnet.com/definition/moral+hazard.html

Because I’m blessed with an unusually high level of disdain for bureaucracy and government in general, it’s extremely rare for me to experience jaw-dropping shock when confronted with the empire’s mouthpieces and their paid pontifications, which are excreted with dreadful regularity in the mainstream media. Then I came across this:

Sheila Bair, the chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., said the agency has set aside $22 billion to cover any projected losses over the next year, leaving $19 billion. The deposit insurance fund now stands at its lowest level in nearly a quarter-century and is raising the assessment on banks and thrifts to give it more money in reserve. “Overall, we’re fine. But it is important for people to understand, we’re backed by the full faith and credit of the United States government. The money will always be there. We can’t run out of money,” Bair said.

“The money will always be there? We can’t run out of money?” Surely this is mere hyperbole, right? I mean, even the government can’t sincerely believe that money is some sort of infinite resource, right?

Perhaps not. (more…)