Oregon is 3rd state to legalize marijuana sales

Oregon Marijuana Shops Begin Legal Sales To Recreational Users Today - Fortune - Tom Huddleston, Jr.:

October 1, 2015 - "Oregon’s legal market for recreational marijuana kicks off Thursday, less than a year after the state’s voters passed a bill allowing Oregon to join the two states where recreational pot sales are already legal: Colorado and Washington. While Alaska and Washington, D.C., voters passed similar bills to legalize recreational pot, Oregon now becomes just the third state to actually establish a system for legal sales. (Alaskan officials are still working out the details of a regulated recreational marijuana market, while D.C.’s laws only legalized the possession of recreational pot, not sales.)

"In Oregon, medical marijuana has been legal since 1998, but now all adults in the state who are at least 21 years of age are able to buy up to a quarter-ounce of weed per day without a note from their doctor. Having an established market for medical marijuana — with a supply system of growers and retailers already in place — could help Oregon’s recreational pot market get off the ground quickly. About 200 of the roughly 345 medical marijuana dispensaries in the state have registered to sell recreational pot as well, according to the Oregon Liquor Control Commission, which also regulates marijuana sales.

"Recreational sales in Oregon will be untaxed through the rest of this year, with a sales tax of 25% set to be added in January after regulators determine the framework for taxing recreational pot. When that framework is finalized, the state is likely to receive a boost in tax revenues. In Colorado, where recreational sales have been legal since the start of 2014, the state collected more money in marijuana taxes in its last fiscal year than it did from taxes on alcohol sales, with a chunk of the cash coming from an excise tax earmarked for public school construction projects.

"While marijuana remains illegal on the federal level, the number of states passing laws to legalize the drug in some form has grown in recent years and several more states are expected to vote on further legalization proposals before the end of next year. While the presidential election is going on next fall, voters in several states — including Arizona, California, Maine, and Nevada — are expected to vote on legalizing recreational marijuana sales.

Read more: http://fortune.com/2015/10/01/oregon-marijuana-sales/
'via Blog this'

Rob Anders supporters urged to vote Libertarian

Rob Anders people still don't like Ron Liepert - Laura Payton, Maclean's:

September 24, 2015 - "Calgary West MP Rob Anders ... lost the Conservative nomination more than a year ago for the newly redrawn riding of Calgary Signal Hill. Ron Liepert, Alberta’s former Progressive Conservative finance minister, won.

"In the lead-up to the nomination vote, Anders dismissed Liepert as a Red Tory, compared Red Tories to 'a flu that just won’t go away' and said Red Tories would have to 'recruit Liberals and New Democrats because they know they don’t have enough numbers in and of themselves.'

"Now, Anders’s former riding association president is asking Conservatives to support the Libertarian candidate in Signal Hill, according to an email provided to Maclean’s.

"'True conservatives were very disappointed when Ron Liepert, with the help of the left, manipulated his way in to the Calgary Signal Hill candidacy for the Conservative Party of Canada,' wrote John DeRinzy, who identifies himself in the email as a former president of the Calgary West Conservative riding association. 'We have gone from having a college-educated, dedicated MP with a voluminous knowledge of history and politics, to a guy who has a history of failure in the provincial arena'....

"DeRinzy writes that he doesn’t want to spoil his ballot or simply not vote, so he is supporting Libertarian candidate Tim Moen. Moen is also the leader of the Libertarian Party of Canada, and DeRinzy says he has committed to working with the federal Conservatives.

"That might be a tough sell, however, if the Conservatives were to win the election and introduce legislation similar to some of the bills they’ve written in the past, including C-51 (a law Liepert supports).... The Libertarian Party platform would also seem to run counter to that of the Conservatives, who have made it a point to crack down on crime: the Libertarians call for the legalization of what they see as victimless crimes, including sex work and the consumption and sale of marijuana. The party also opposes military missions.

"DeRinzy notes in the email that he doesn’t agree with everything the Libertarians stand for, but says he didn’t agree with the Conservatives on everything either.

"'I stand fully behind the Conservative Party of Canada’s efforts to make a positive difference in the lives of Canadians by implementing strong conservative values. But I have to help Tim Moen defeat Ron Liepert, in order to assist the Party. Can you imagine the chaos another red tory will do in the Harper caucus?'

Read more: http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/rob-anders-people-still-dont-like-ron-liepert/
'via Blog this'

Raid on raw milk farm thwarted by social media

Wrong that raw milk raids continue | Guest column | Opinion | Toronto Sun - Karen Selick:

October 4, 2015 - "On Friday, Oct. 2, 20 or so investigators from various Ontario government departments, accompanied by six armed police officers, raided Glencolton Farms, the co-operative farm in Grey Bruce County where raw milk advocate Michael Schmidt manages the dairy operation .... They arrived with a truck and a search warrant authorizing them to seize and remove numerous items for a raw milk investigation.

"The news spread quickly on Facebook and Twitter. Soon, 50 co-op members were at the farm, shoulder-to-shoulder, barring the exit to the invaders. Eventually, a deal was negotiated: the cops and bureaucrats would leave with nothing more than a few computers that had already been removed (which they promised to return), and the co-op owners would stand aside.

"This is the third such raid that Michael Schmidt has undergone.... Each time, Schmidt has been convicted of one or more regulatory offences relating to raw milk. Each time, he has been fined thousands of dollars.... Each time, the story caught the attention of increasing numbers of Canadians, who became curious about raw milk and wanted to acquire some. So each time, the province’s strong-arm tactics have backfired, increasing rather than reducing the number of raw milk drinkers in the province....

"Today, Canada makes the pasteurization of milk mandatory, but many countries around the world do not. Roughly half of the U.S. states allow sales of raw milk. In at least six European countries, raw milk is legally sold in vending machines....  The Canadian government says that unpasteurized milk is dangerous and people shouldn’t drink it. But ... there has not been even a single report of illness relating to the raw milk that Schmidt has produced over the past 27 years.....

"The controversy over raw milk has led researchers in Europe to conduct wide-ranging scientific studies.... The GABRIELA study published in 2011 ...  involved 8,000 school-aged children. Those who had consumed raw milk had a roughly 50% lower risk of asthma and allergies.

"Since asthma kills approximately 250 Canadians every year, it is perfectly reasonable for adults afflicted with the disease to seek out raw milk as a preventative measure for their children.

"Schmidt has consistently sought opportunities for the past 27 years to meet with provincial officials and negotiate a way to give Ontarians the option of consuming raw milk without breaking the law. The response has always been a cold shoulder.... Kathleen Wynne’s administration continues to follow the failed policy of raiding and harassing Schmidt and the co-owners of the co-operative farm."

Read more: http://www.torontosun.com/2015/10/04/wrong-that-raw-milk-raids-continue
'via Blog this'

New book on 'the most misunderstood libertarian'

The Most Misunderstood Libertarian - Online Library of Law & Liberty - Alberto Mingardi:

September 28, 2015 - "To the surprise of many, scholarship on Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) has flourished in the last few years. A towering figure in Victorian Britain, Spencer was all but forgotten after his death. His works, which taken together form a 'Synthetic Philosophy,' seemed alien to 20th century academics in an age of meticulous specialization. Also his commitment to individual liberty and (seriously) limited government has not been too common in the discipline that he helped establish, sociology.... Spencer may be routinely included among the forerunners of modern libertarianism but it is rather uncommon to find a contemporary individualist thinker deliberately appealing to his insights....

"The paradox of one of the fiercest libertarians ever to be ignored by libertarians emerges vividly from Herbert Spencer: Legacies, edited by Mark Francis and Michael Taylor.... Spencer’s legacy is plural, as the title of this collection suggests, and may have come to us mediated by subsequent developments in different fields. The plural nature of the 'legacies' is stressed throughout, and has multiple dimensions: disciplinary, political, and even geographical...

"Taylor stresses how Spencer goes for voluntary and spontaneous arrangements, not necessarily for institutional settings based on the price system. But this won’t sound particularly controversial or new to libertarians, who, despite the caricature often made of them, understand that not everything in life is tradable at a money price. Their point is more subtle (and Spencerian): that is, top-down government intrusions may retard or altogether stop the spontaneous evolution (or adaptation to new circumstances) of human societies....

"One of the many take-aways of this book is that Spencer was a far more complex thinker than those who only know him as a diabolical 'social Darwinist.' Its essays might, for example, open the eyes of those who still have in mind the Herbert Spencer largely manufactured in the 1940s by Richard Hofstadter in a book that made history as a beautifully written and yet quite misleading tirade. Taylor explains that Spencer never thought that 'social existence involved an unrelenting struggle for survival in which the richest were the most successful and the poor should go to the wall.' He quotes Thomas Leonard’s important study on the Hofstadterian myth....

"Francis, who like his co-editor cites the Leonard monograph, also makes clear Spencer’s commitment to pacifism: 'Spencerians believed that imperial conquest might have been a natural phenomenon when employed by ancient states, but was an archaic activity in modern times' and a most immoral one. The thread running through all of Spencer’s works is the idea that society progresses toward the minimization of violence, which had been needed at earlier stages of civilization....

"This book may convey a sense of Spencer’s true understanding of complexity.... His magnificent The Study of Sociology (1873) would be a relevant work for those interested in the proper role of the social sciences and their limits, if only they read it....

"If I had any quibble about this impressive collection, it would be that the propensity to consider The Man Versus the State as 'just' a political pamphlet causes the contributors to overlook that this is perhaps the first work whose arguments are truly centered around the notion of unintended consequences. All in all, though, Herbert Spencer: Legacies may foster a better understanding of this seminal thinker and raise yet more interest in his underappreciated writings."

Read more: http://www.libertylawsite.org/book-review/the-most-misunderstood-libertarian/
'via Blog this'

Is the U.S. Constitution a libertarian document?

“Is the Constitution Libertarian?” My Baxter Liberty Initiative Lecture on 10/6 - The Washington Post - Randy Barnett, the Volokh Conspiracy:

September 29, 2015 - "On Tuesday, October 6th, I will be giving the Baxter Liberty Initiative Lecture, sponsored by the Political Science Department of the University of California at Berkeley. The topic on which I was asked to speak is 'Is the Constitution Libertarian?'...  I just finished writing my lecture. Here is a portion of how it begins:

"Truth be told, libertarians have a love-hate relationship with the Constitution. On the one hand libertarians, like most Americans, revere the Constitution. Libertarians particularly appreciate its express guarantees of individual liberty and its mechanisms to preserve limited government. If being American is to subscribe to a creed, then the Constitution, along with the Declaration of Independence, are the foundational statements of this creed.

"But some libertarians have issues with the Constitution as well. And here I speak for myself, as well as others. There was a reason I eschewed writing about and teaching Constitutional Law when I became a law professor in favor of teaching Contracts. For, after taking Constitutional Law in law school, I considered the Constitution a noble, but largely failed experiment in limiting the powers of government. In my con law class, every time we got to one of the 'good parts' of the text that protected liberty, we turned the page to read a Supreme Court opinion explaining why that clause did not really mean what it appeared to mean....

"This fundamental failure of the Constitution to limit the size and scope of government has even led some libertarians to contend that the enactment of the Constitution represented a coup d’état by big government Federalists against the more preferable state-centered regime defined by the Articles of Confederation and favored by the Antifederalists.

"Yet many libertarians are genuinely torn, one might go so far as to say schizophrenic, about how the Constitution has actually worked out. Big and intrusive as government is today, it could be much worse. Few can point to other countries where individuals are freer in practice than in the U.S.... Libertarians still refer to the U.S. as a 'free country,' maybe still the freest on earth. That the Constitution deserves at least some of the credit for this freedom seems likely."

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/09/29/is-the-constitution-libertarian-my-baxter-liberty-initiative-lecture-on-106/
'via Blog this'

Libertarian 'loving every minute' of first campaign

Libertarian 'loving every minute' of his first election campaign - Richard Vivian Cambridge Times:

"First-time politician Nathan Lajeunesse acknowledges he’s far from a frontrunner to become Kitchener South-Hespeler’s first MP, but he’s 'loving every minute' of the campaign.

"Representing the Libertarian Party of Canada, this 29-year-old Hespeler native and professional ironworker is eager to provide voters with an alternative to candidates representing the more traditional parties.

"'I’m the only one that’s going to be saying something different than the other three,' he said, referring to the Liberal, Conservative and New Democratic party candidates. 'All of them try to stay right around the middle, whereas there are things we strongly oppose and think that need to be changed.'

"Chief among those changes, Lajeunesse explained, is less government, lower taxes and re-establishing 'an actual monetary system that’s backed by a real commodity and could actually hold value over a long period of time and inflation would not always have to increase.' A commodity such as gold, he said, would provide a better comparison for determining the true value of a dollar than stacking Canuck bucks up against American greenbacks'....

"'I think I’m going to open up a lot of people’s eyes to a new idea and that they don’t have to be bullied by the big three – there are other options,' he said.

"The candidate has some signs up throughout the riding and has taken part in a few media interviews, but don’t expect to find him knocking on any doors....

"'I want to … be accessible,' said Lajeunesse. 'I’ve always found when people come and knock on my door, it’s never the right time. That’s where I have a problem with the knocking on the doors.'

"If anyone wants to talk about the Libertarian approach, or his candidacy, Lajeunesse encourages people to email him at nathanlajeunesse@gmail.com and set up a time to chat.

"'There is not one aspect of my campaign that I’ve done that I think I’ve hit the nail right on the head. I think every aspect I’m going to do better next time,' Lajeaunesse admitted, noting this won’t be the only time people see his name on a ballot."

Read more: http://www.cambridgetimes.ca/news-story/5929654-libertarian-loving-every-minute-of-his-first-election-campaign/
'via Blog this'

Happy Birthday copyright claim invalid, judge rules

'Happy Birthday' song copyright claims are invalid, federal judge rules - LA Times - Christine Mai-Duc::

September 22, 2015 - "None of the companies that have collected royalties on the 'Happy Birthday' song for the past 80 years held a valid copyright claim to one of the most popular songs in history, a federal judge in Los Angeles ruled on Tuesday.

"In a stunning reversal of decades of copyright claims, the judge ruled that Warner/Chappell never had the right to charge for the use of the 'Happy Birthday To You' song. Warner had been enforcing a copyright since 1988, when it bought Birch Tree Group, the successor to Clayton F. Summy Co., which claimed the original disputed copyright.

"Judge George H. King ruled that a copyright filed by the Summy Co. in 1935 granted only the rights to specific piano arrangements of the music, not the actual song.

"'"Happy Birthday" is finally free after 80 years,' said Randall Newman, an attorney for the plaintiffs in the suit, which included a group of filmmakers who are producing a documentary about the song. 'Finally, the charade is over. It's unbelievable.'

"Until now, Warner has asked for royalties from anyone who wanted to sing or play 'Happy Birthday to You' – with the lyrics – as part of a profit-making enterprise. Royalties were most often collected from stage productions, television shows, movies or greeting cards. But even those who wanted to sing the song publicly as part of a business, say a restaurant owner giving out free birthday cake to patrons, technically had to pay to use the song....

"Two of the filmmaker plaintiffs paid $1,500 and $3,000 for the rights to use the song, their attorneys said. Filmmaker Steve James paid Warner $5,000 to use the song in his 1994 documentary Hoop Dreams.

"At a March hearing in the case, records show, a Warner/Chappell representative seated in the audience told the judge that the company collects as much as 'six figures' for certain single uses of the song. The song brings in about $2 million a year in royalties for Warner, according to some estimates....

"It is not entirely clear, the judge ruled, that the Hill sisters wrote the lyrics for 'Happy Birthday To You.' But either way, they never asserted a copyright claim for the lyrics, even though they sued for the rights to the original melody....

"Ultimately, the judge ruled that no evidence existed that the Summy Co. -- the original company to assert a copyright claim -- ever legally obtained the rights to the ... song from whomever wrote it.

"Tuesday's ruling means that the song is now considered a public work and is free for everyone to use without fear of having to pay for it, according to a statement from the plaintiffs' attorneys."

Read more: http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-happy-birthday-song-lawsuit-decision-20150922-story.html
'via Blog this'