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Now that we have a new regime in place (at the top of our political atmosphere), and the turmoil between angered voters has been put on a soft mute (for now), you cant help but take in the freshness of it all. Or can you?

Weve seen an about-face trend in the stock market from what was predicted but where is all this money? People are still living in a constant state of financial alertness, for good reason. We have seen this playout too many times in the past generation. Regime change equals economic redirection. Which side of the fence you are on depends how you are projected to fare over the next few years, if you follow trends.

Lets turn back the clock to 2000. Bush is in, and the conservatives are celebrating their national championship. Liberals are cringing at the prospect of reigning in the expansion of government entitlements and the influx of a new idea of tolerance. The glut of big money investment is about to roll out into corporate take-overs and incessant greed of the, soon to be feared, one percent.

We all know how the Bush administration went; ugh, debt, debt and some more debt. That deficit rose quicker than the technology of those futuristic new smart phones that were coming out. We wanted change we needed change. But, all we did was change the side of the celebration.

We pumped more and more into government expansion and entitlements for those street-destroying celebrators of change. The held-out hand seemed not to drop a thing, as the ones that were used to holding on to their investments and portfolios found new interests in storm shelters and 30-round magazines. Those same people probably thought at the time, that the Arkansas dress destroyer was a saint compared to what was coming out of Kenya.

The eight year reign of the liberal agenda helped the hopeless aspire to receive far more than they contributed: citing free phones, healthcare and questionable bathroom preferences. Our national debt continues to climb, right along with a manifested racial divide and sprinkled in terrorist attacks , as well as those killer cops.

Still, the winners of 08 claimed that progress was the right track for the equality of all. You were deemed a racist, intolerant, or a bigot if you thought otherwise.

2016: The year of what just happened? Well, it happened again. The swing back to conservative-ism or, as the newly found losers called it, not my America.

Here we are, primed for the run. As I alluded to previously, the so-far surprise market is a base moniker of how we are doing, right? First quarter projections are now rolling in and American manufacturing as a whole is taking a woodshed beating. We are seeing it in non-technical manufacturing very hard, reminding those who have been around long enough to boast those comments, remember 01, or 09? We took a beating those years. Head scratcher, huh?

If you were to make a prediction of the outlook for 2017, it looks like a safe bet for the status quo. The only thing different is that the winners gloated a little more, and the losers well, are they done yet? It is merely a continuation of the same things we have dealt with our entire adult lives. So, it might be a good idea to keep conserving your money, play wisely with retirements, and for heavens sake get on that highway of progress; that fabled economic growth that every politician ever has spouted about.

We are all meant to be winners in this game of big ol gubmint, or so they say. The nation may veer to the left or to the right and back again, but we continue in the same basic direction, paying our forced tithes to the downward spiral. To be happy about it you simply need to jump onto a different bandwagon every four or eight years. My hope is for the bandwagon of Enough Already. But dont look to jump on it anytime soon.

* Wes Fischer self supporting libertarian focused on shrinking our government one action at a time.

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I'm with the Band(wagon) - Being Libertarian

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Being a libertarian in college can feel like youre a Jedi surrounded by a droid army. Youre constantly under attack with only a few friends. Well, this is the way Tom Ciccotta portrayed it in a New York Times op-ed on February 28th.

Leftists, in an effort to make campuses welcoming ostensibly, for everyone end up frequently silencing conservative and libertarian students, Ciccotta, a senior at Bucknell University, wrote. They paint any argument that isnt progressive as immoral, so conservative students can find themselves branded as such. Needless to say, this can be socially isolating.

Ciccotta is completely sincere in his analysis about life as a libertarian on campus. But is his experience the norm or the exception?

Christina Herrin attended The University of Iowa, one of the most liberal colleges in the state. She was regularly involved in the Young Americans for Liberty (YAL) and as well as Rand Pauls presidential campaign in 2015 and 2016. She told Red Alert Politics that there were many instances in which she felt the administration and other students were against her. On one occasion, pro-life chalking they etched was washed away because it was offensive. In another instance, Iowas YAL chapter was kicked off campus while trying to demonstrate against the war on drugs.

I agree 100 percent with [Ciccottas] article and institutions that promote free speech zones and safe spaces and dont encourage diversity of thought are doing a great disservice to my generation, Herrin said. It is sad to me because even though I dont agree, the amount I have learned while debating with others has taught me so much about my own argument, and has actually pushed me to be more conservative/liberty minded.

It was frustrating and difficult for me, as a student, to have friends who were unwilling to even come listen to Rand Paul speak when we brought him to campus because he was whatever liberal sound bite youd like to insert, she continued. It is hard to have people that are so guarded by their walls to even look at another opinion.

Conner Dunleavy, who attends the University atAlbany, also felt that college campuses were biased against libertarian positions. He said that he was lucky because libertarian-leaning organizations like YAL were growing rapidly. However, outside of that, there were very few people willing to be open to his politics.

Outside of our clubs, however, universities are often political deserts where only the perceived majority opinion is tolerated, Conner Dunleavy said to RAP. Naturally it seems conservative students were our allies, outnumbered together and facing the sometimes violent liberal students who tend to try shouting down minority opinions.

Yet, Ciccotta, Dunleavy, and Herrins experiences werent universal among prominent libertarians when they were in college.

I do not feel like my views get silenced as much, but there is a lack of political diversity in most of the liberal arts majors, said Vamsi Krishna Pappusetti, a student at Arizona State University. My YAL chapter does not get protested nor do the faculty keep us from tabling or holding meetings. We try to table out as much as we can and I never really dealt with many hecklers. I cannot say the same for other students though from either TP USA or College Republicans.

So while most libertarians did feel isolated in a political desert, there were exceptions to the rule. Not every student felt surrounded waiting for Yoda to save them.

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Is it lonely being a libertarian in college? - Red Alert Politics

President Trump's recent executive order, titled "Reducing Regulation and Controlling Regulatory Cost," speaks the language of the principled libertarians, but its beneficiaries are likely to be the thugs.

The order prohibits any agency from issuing any new regulation unless it also repeals two regulations that cost as much as the new one. "Costs" mean the cost of complying with the regulation. The harms that were the reason for the regulation don't count at all.

David Dana and Michael Barsa observe the implications of Trump's order. The Department of Interior created a set of new regulations in response to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster, in which BP spilled nearly 5 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. It was the largest marine oil spill in history, and, Dana and Barsa wrote, it cost "nearly $9 billion for lost fisheries and $23 billion for lost tourism, not to mention the catastrophic effects on marine life and birds. Yet under the president's order, the only costs that matter are those to the oil companies. Costs to the public and to the environment are completely ignored." The regulations aren't cheap; the cost to the industry has been estimated at hundreds of millions. But that's peanuts compared to the costs of another spill.

Trump is a big fan of Ayn Rand. Like her fictional hero John Galt in "Atlas Shrugged," he wants to free business from the heavy hand of government. But this is an oddly distorted libertarianism, in which Rand's villains masquerade as her heroes: those who talk most of liberty are the looters and moochers.

Conservatives worry about "regulatory capture": the danger that regulators will abandon the public interest at the behest of regulated industries, keeping prices high and stifling competition. The solution is to get rid of regulation: the state should butt out and let the market operate. There's no doubt that capture has sometimes happened. A notorious example is the Civil Aeronautics Board: after it was abolished in 1985, airline competition intensified and prices plunged.

There is, however, another way in which unworthy special interests can seize control of government. They can work to cripple regulation, so that they can hurt and defraud people. Libertarian rhetoric has turned out to be a rich resource for them.

Barack Obama is actually a better libertarian than Trump. He spent years teaching at the University of Chicago, where the idea of regulatory capture was developed. That had an impact: when he was President, he demanded (following a principle laid down by Ronald Reagan!) that any new regulations survive rigorous cost-benefit analysis. That immunizes regulations from capture, and makes sure that regulators take account of just what worries Trump, the cost to businesses. The overall net value -- benefits minus costs -- of Obama's regulations was upward of $100 billion.

Trump, on the other hand, has replaced cost-benefit analysis with cost analysis. Benefits are ignored. This isn't even business-friendly. The Deepwater Horizon oil spill destroyed hundreds of well-functioning businesses. On the other hand, the businesses that were crushed were small and had nothing like BP's political connections.

There's room for reasonable disagreement with Obama's regulations. The calculation of both costs and benefits inevitably involves some guesswork. The cumulative effect of regulation can hamper businesses. The big difference between Trump and the standard conservatives' critique of Obama is that Trump's executive order holds, as a matter of principle, that benefits don't matter. Consumer fraud, tainted food, pollution, unsafe airplanes and trains, epidemic disease all have to be put up with, if stopping them would increase the costs of regulation.

Trump's new "regulatory reforms" show a persistent pattern. One targets a rule that requires retirement advisers to put clients' interests ahead of their own. Conflicts of interest in retirement advice, for example steering clients into products with higher fees and lower returns, costs American families an estimated $17 billion a year. You can understand why some parts of the financial industry hated the rule. That $17 billion was going into someone's pocket, and that someone finds libertarian rhetoric right handy.

The Libertarian Party, which got more than 4 million votes in the last presidential election, is enthusiastic about the order. It shouldn't be. The order is a deep betrayal of libertarianism, which holds that people should do what they want as long as they don't hurt anyone else.

Freeing businesses to hurt people is not libertarian. The libertarians -- at least, the ones who don't see through Trump -- are being played. If the crippling of the state allows economic behemoths to do whatever they like to others, then what libertarianism licenses, in the garb of liberty, is the creation of a new aristocracy, entitled to hurt the commoners. This is just a different kind of mooching and looting.

It is a new road to serfdom. It reinforces the prejudices of those on the left who repudiate capitalism. The libertarians who embrace it, thinking that they are thereby promoting freedom, are useful idiots, like the idealistic leftists of the 1930s whose hatred of poverty and racism led them to embrace Stalin. John Galt is a sap.

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Trump's 'libertarianism' endangers the public - CNN

As Kirralie Smith sits at a sidewalk table in Taree for an interview this week, there is a palpable tension. Sheis mistrustful of what she calls the mainstream media, particularly those elements she believes are biased towards the left.

But Smithhas agreed to talk because she will, she says, use any platform to express her view that Islam is an ideology of violence, intolerance and sexism.

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Kirralie Smith is a well-known anti-Islamic politician and activist, and she is being tapped as Australia's newest libertarian leader.

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The former head of the NSW gaming authority has said it was a mistake for the former NSW Premier Barry O'Farrell to grant a licence to James Packer to build a high rollers casino in Sydney without a public inquiry. ABC TV's Four Corners

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Violence has increased in suburbs surrounding the lockout precincts in the Sydney CBD and Kings Cross, according to a report from the Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research.

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Revenue from car parking is a major earner across Australia's four largest airport with Melbourne at the top of the list.

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The CSIRO Marine Debris team spent three years surveying the plastic pollution affecting Australias beaches and oceans.

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Fairfax's Nick Moir went down to Dee Why beach to look at the increased swell

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Police are investigating the death of a 55-year-old woman after her body was found in an apartment building in Sydney's west on Sunday night.

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The experienced pilot is recovering in hospital after he crashed his single engine plane into a paddock at Tumut, west of Canberra.

Kirralie Smith is a well-known anti-Islamic politician and activist, and she is being tapped as Australia's newest libertarian leader.

Smith received relatively little attention during the last federal election as a NSW Senate candidate for the Australian Liberty Alliance, the political offshoot of the Q Society, which describes itself as "Australia's leading Islam-critical movement".

("Q Society supports an integrated multi-ethnic Australia and rejects racism, which the Oxford dictionary defines as: 'Belief in the superiority of a particular race.' Since Islam is not a race or ethnicity, being critical of Islam is not racist," its website explains.)

But she is likely to receive far more press in the coming weeks as the co-defendant in a defamation action being brought by the businessman Mohammed El-Mouelhy, who was the subject of a critical video produced by the Q Society and presented by Smith.

Already Smith and the Q Society, also named in the suit, have rallied an impressive line-up of public supporters, including Coalition right-wingersCory Bernardi, George Christensen and the former MP Ross Cameron, who are among a handful of public figures set to address fundraisers to be held in Sydney and Melbourne on February 9 and 10.

We sit and both reach for our phones to turn on recording apps. Smith has already explained that she wants her own record of our conversation. The tension dissipates a little when a sky-blue ute throbs past us and Smith laughs and points out the personalised number plate, "TRUMP1". Later she will tell me that she rejects the suggestion she is right wing, rather, she says she a part of the silent majority of mainstream conservatives whose voices are now being heard due to victories of Donald Trump and the Brexit campaign.

Smith says she never intended to pursue politics. She has always been happiest as a wife and mother. "I love being my husband's wife," she says to emphasise the point.

As it was, a confluence of events brought her to her mission. In 2000 Smith and her husband Greg, a tradesman, sought out volunteer work in Mali and there met the Assemblies of God missionary Faouzi Arzouni, whom she describes as a Muslim apostate who became a friend and mentor.

Two years later the couple went on another trip, a 10-day visit to refugee camps ofthe displaced of what is now known as the Maluku sectarian conflict in Indonesia, during which Christian and Muslim communities fell into violent political and ethnic conflict. Smith recalls sitting in refugee camps hearing terrible stories of violence perpetrated by Muslims.

In 2009 Smith's husband took her to a talk being given by Mark Durie, an Anglican vicar. During that lecture Durie expressed concern about buying certain supermarket products because they had been certified as halal.

Smith was intrigued and began her own investigations on the internet, learning that many brands are halal-certified, and that a portion of the fees paid for such certification is donated to Muslim charities. In other countries, Smith contends, those charities have directed funds towards groups with terrorist links. Her online investigation became a website, Halal Choices, a campaign and, with the support of Bernardi and Christensen, a parliamentary inquiry into "third party" food certification. Finally it became a political ambit, with Smith running for the ALA in a campaign launched by the anti-Islamic immigration Dutch MP Geert Wilders.

"There is no question of our country being Islamified. Now, this reply constituted a historical error as soon as it was uttered," Wilders once told Dutch parliament.

"I can report that they have had enough of burkas, headscarves, the ritual slaughter of animals, socalled honour revenge, blaring minarets, female circumcision, hymen restoration operations, abuse of homosexuals, Turkish and Arabic on the buses and trains as well as on town hall leaflets, halal meat at grocery shops and department stores, Sharia exams, the Finance Minister's Sharia mortgages, and the enormous over-representation of Muslims in the area of crime, including Moroccan street terrorists," Wilders said.

Smith says she does not believe there is an imminent threat of adopting Sharia law, but is concerned about what she calls "creeping Sharia".

"We are being encouraged very strongly to tolerate Sharia finance, halal certification, the hijab," she says.

"Sharia is definitely present in Australia I believe there are honour killings and it is all reported under domestic violence or another name," she says. As evidence she says she has close friends who are pastors who work in churches who have provided sanctuary to victims.

But Smith's concerns are broader than creeping sharia. During the US election she was horrified by Hillary Clinton's support for abortion rights. She opposes political correctness, Safe Schools andbig government regulations imposed upon farmers by distant bureaucrats.

"I pretty much oppose everything the Greens stand for," she says.

She was also appalled by the Liberal Party's abandonment of Tony Abbott for Malcolm Turnbull.

This broader political outlook, and Smith's articulate direct manner, has led some observers to speculate that she is a potential leader for a new conservative movement, one energised by the international populist surge.

She is, says John Adams, a former Coalition adviser who has written about the need for more intellectual depth in the new conservative movement, a more capable and charismatic messenger than, say, Pauline Hanson. ("I think Pauline has a lot of good sentiment, I am not sure about the ability," says Smith of Hanson.)

In the months since the campaign Smith has kept in touch with supporters via videos on her Facebook page. In them she is relentlessly bright and articulate, upbeat about Christmas and Australia Day, though scandalised by the recent billboard that showed a pair of little girls celebrating in a hijab andcheerily opposed to the "threat" of multiculturalism. She denies ever having had media training, though confesses that she is constantly asked if she has.

Asked if she plans to run for office again Smith says she cannot answer the question as her entire focus is directed towards the defamation action and her family.

"People say this is sexist, well I am sexist, I love being a wife and mother, that is the best I have ever done in my life I love being my husband's wife."

In the next breath she adds that sheand her husband have made the decision to use any platform to put forward their message.

"I want to be able to look my children in the eye and say I did everything I could to stand for what is right."

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported the Reverend Mark Durie's relationship to the Q Society. He is in fact an occasional speaker for the Q Society.

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Islam-critical Kirralie Smith seen as potential ...

Writing in the March/April issue of Politico Magazine, Tim Albertas headline posesa question that has been all too popular nowadays. Namely, does the age of Trump signal the end of the libertarian dream?

From the piece:

After generations of being relegated to the periphery of American politics, they are seeing some of their most precious ideals accepted and advocated for at the highest levels of government. But in many policy areas, there has never been a president who poses a greater threat to what they hold dearone who is poised, potentially, to reorient the GOP electorate toward a strong, active, centralized and protectionist federal government.

RELATED:Rand Paul can save health care reform

Indeed, so far the Trump administration has beenpretty schizophrenic when it comes to liberty. On one hand, the confirmation of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos is thegreatest political victory school choicecommunity has experiencedon the federal level. Similarly, President Trumps two-for-one deregulatory special, while questionable on its implementation, signals a serious effort to dismantle the regulatory state.

On the other hand, Trump is so far removed from libertarian ideals on other issues, itboggles the mind. He wants to spend $1 trillion on big government infrastructure projects. He wants to build up the military and once threatened to bomb the shit out of ISIS. His protectionist agenda threatens less immigration, travel, and trade across Americas borders.

This split in policy has similarly split libertarians politically and professionally.As a young professional in Washington, Ive seen many close friends and acquaintances in the libertarian network get tapped by the administration for a potential job. Some say yes, reasoning that its better to have a seat at the table than be on the menu. Others say no,reckoning that theres no need to abandon their ideals if theyre already satisfied at a job where they can keep them.

Of course, theres no right or wrong answer. A well-functioning administration should ideally have both practical libertarians on the insidedoing the hardwork implementingpro-libertychange as well as idealist libertarians on the outsideholding them to their most cherished values. This dual dynamicseems to only avail itself during Republican administrations, presenting libertarians with a rare opportunity in the age of Trump to actually achieve some policy victories.

In short, anyone bemoaning the end of the libertarian moment in the age of Trump isnt looking close enough. Certainly, libertariansmay have seemed stronger when we were a united opposition front to the Obama administration. After all, its much sexier to be a critic than thanan actual agent of change. Nevertheless, Trumps ascent to the presidencyis itself a vindication of libertarian policy on certain issues (education, regulation) and an invitation on othersto join the team and fight for liberty (taxes, spending).

RELATED:Who are we? | The liberty movement in the Trump era

The movement is sure seem silent or even fractured in the next few years, but looks may be deceiving. Behind the stillness are hundreds of libertarians infiltrating the administrative state, influencing federal bureaucracies that havent been subject to internal restraint for years. Behind the split are libertarian think tanks and advocacy groups who have the ear of the ruling Republican party and can successfully pressure them to make pro-liberty policy victories.

In short, Mr. Libertarian has gone to Washington, and the opportunities are endless.

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Mr. Libertarian goes to Washington - Rare.us