The Free View - weblog of a presidential candidate

I've got a number of articles that I've been wanting to highlight-- each good enough to deserve its own explorative entry. But then on the other hand, there's reality-- and in reality, I am not going to get around to giving each of these the special treatment they deserve. So instead I am going to just lay them all out here with a brief statement about what I found especially worthwhile in each of them. They all can be assumed to be preceded by the statement, "This is a particularly great article that I very much recommend reading."

Shane Stenfield of PoliticalNonviolence.org posted a dispatch at Bureaucrash a long time ago about his experience being a co-presenter at a College Freedom Tour stop. What makes it great is how he explains the advantages of using economic rather than political power to affect change. He has a cool way of doing it, and he describes how he took the audience through an interactive demonstration to make his point. While I've long touted the benefits of persuasive market activism over coercive political activism, Shane showed me a different way to approach selling it. Check it out here.

In this column by Radley Balko (titled "Bush Pursues Big-Gov Nanny State"), Balko takes President Bush to task for reducing freedom by expanding government, at home and abroad.

James Bovard does a tremendous service with his efforts to document the tremendous overreach of the government, especially when it comes to civil liberties. In a recent article for Reason Online, he bares the soul of the Transportation Security Administration. "Dominate. Intimidate. Control." That's the name of the article-- it was taken from the motto that's posted at the TSA's air marshal center. Wait until you hear how some air marshals decided to live out that motto.

"How to Lose Your Job in Talk Radio" is an article by conservative talk show host Charles Goyette. The subtitle of it is "Clear Channel gags an anti-war conservative". That tells you in a nutshell what the article's focus is. But you should still read it, if just to hear the story in Goyette's own words.

Jacob Lyles, a columnist for Wake Forest University's school paper, wrote a superb column about George Bush called "No Longer a Conservative". It contains this gem:

Big national goals are never easy on the taxpayer. For every national goal accomplished, a hundred private goals lay in ashes to fund it. For every hunk of metal the government puts on Mars, a working mother does not buy school supplies for her daughter, a middle-class family goes without a family car and a billionaire cannot open a new factory.

and this similar gem:

Bush's State of the Union address promises to push forward the era of big government that started under his rule. He is determined to strip people of the ability to solve the problems dearest to them in order that he may solve ones that put him on the pages of history.

I've also got some sites to highlight, but I'll put them in another entry.