INDEX
Abortion , Adoption ,
Civil Forfeiture , Corporate_Welfare,
Defense_Welfare, Education Reform ,
Farm Welfare,
Marijuana , Personal Freedom ,
Privatization , Right to Keep and Bear Arms ,
Small_Business, Social_Security ,
State Government , Taxes , Term Limits ,
The War On (Some) Drugs , and Welfare.
The Central Massachusetts Liberty Coalition calls for low taxes, small government, personal freedom, and individual responsibility. We celebrate the right of all people to live life as they see fit without harming others. To achieve these goals in our lifetime, we propose some appropriate goals for pro-Liberty voters in Massachusetts.
We recognize that Liberty is above all about freedom, the freedom to make personal choices. Some of us choose to support all of these issues. Some of choose to support some issues, and to disagree on others. That's fine! Liberty is about a direction, not a horde of people marching in lock-step.
The CMLC condemns the Weld/Dukakis/Cellucci/Romney policy of ever-increasing state budgets, fiscal smoke and mirrors to hide the true condition of the Commonwealth's finances, massive and irrational increases in the state debt, and ever-increasing tax breaks for well-placed wheeler-dealers.
The Central Massachusetts Liberty Coalition condemns Federal intrusion into legitimate functions of state government via the attachment of extraneous conditions on Federal funding provided to state governments. We support the responsibility of the Federal government to ensure that its funds are not stolen or spent improperly. We condemn the Federal policy for imposing on highway construction funds conditions not related to the construction, design, or maintenance of highways. We call upon the Commonwealth to reject and return to Washington any Federal funds that come with improper strings attached.
The Central Massachusetts Liberty Coalition calls for a Constitutional amendment forbidding the Federal government to transfer Federal tax moneys to state, county, local, or other levels of government, other than in payment for specific services rendered to the Federal government itself. The power to spend government money on legitimate government purposes -- such as roads, courts, law enforcement -- should always be associated with the painful duty -- on elected public officials -- to impose the taxes to pay for those expenditures.
Pensions for government employees, without exception, should be put in the form of guaranteed-payment plans with instant full vesting for new employees. The cost of providing pensions for government employees should be born by those who enjoy their services, not by the taxpayers of the future. Correspondingly, government employees should realize that guaranteed-payment/instant vesting pension plans are the only guarantee worth more than a politician's promise that they will ever receive a pension. The TIAA-CREF plans now used by educational institutions across the Commonwealth provide an excellent model for such plans.
The Central Massachusetts Liberty Coalition opposes all tax increases. We particularly condemn the graduated income tax.
We call for the immediate repeal of the state sales tax. The sales tax is regressive, falling most heavily on the poor. Collecting the sales tax is one more needless burden on Massachusetts' small businesses. Abolition of the sales tax would create a massive sucking sound at our state borders -- the sound of money being sucked out of neighboring high-tax states into Massachusetts, and the sound of Massachusetts money being sucked back from tax-free New Hampshire.
We call for an end to the state use tax, whose enforcement is constitutionally dubious and highly erratic.
We call for an end to burdensome extra taxes on 'unearned' income. All income is earned, whether by the sweat of one's brow or by the pain of denial that lets one save and hold real assets.
All fee increases should be approved by the state legislature or the electorate in a general election, as required by the Commonwealth's Constitution. The current practice of delegating this responsibility to administrative agencies is cowardly and unconstitutional.
The Central Massachusetts Liberty Coalition calls for a ban on the use of state or local taxes or bonds for building sports arenas, convention centers, and other grandiose facilities for profitable use of the few. If an athletic facility or convention center makes economic sense, it makes sense for users to pay for it. State-built stadiums and conventions centers represent money torn from the pocketbooks and wallets of working mothers and small business owners, and transferred by the Commonwealth to the paychecks of multimillionaire athletes and well-connected friends of politicians.
The CMLC calls for an end to all TIFs and other tax-reduction schemes for the politically connected few.. Have you ever seen a property tax break for your local hardware store? Taxes should be imposed equally on all businesses, rather than being limited to firms whose owners lack the political connections to avoid being taxed.
The Central Massachusetts Liberty Coalition supports the right of law-abiding citizens to keep and bear arms to protect themselves, their families and property, and their freedoms. Detailed modern studies show that broadened firearms ownership would avert thousands of rapes and murders each year.
The Central Massachusetts Liberty Coalition favors the repeal of the Bartley-Fox law requiring mandatory prison sentences for carrying or possessing arms without the proper license.
The Central Massachusetts Liberty Coalition favors repeal of Massachusetts laws requiring licensing for carrying non-lethal self-defense devices such as pepper spray and mace.
The Central Massachusetts Liberty Coalition calls for passage of so-called 'Vermont-style' concealed carry laws for the Commonwealth. Under Vermont-style concealed carry, any adult who has not been convicted of a violent felony may legally carry a concealed weapon for self-defense. Self-defense is particularly important for members of groups subject to random acts of violence, such as professional women walking from office to car, homeowners, gays, parents, and African-Americans.
The Central Massachusetts Liberty Coalition condemns the Attorney General's abuse of consumer protection laws to threaten the right to keep and bear arms.
The Central Massachusetts Liberty Coalition calls on Massachusetts' representatives in Washington to work for the repeal of all Federal firearms laws.
Education proceeds from the home environment. For a growing child, there is no substitute for the parent who reads to his children, keeps books in the home, and gives her children a full variety of educational experiences.
The Central Massachusetts Liberty Coalition supports credits against the property and income taxes for parents who are paying the cost of educating their own children through private or home schooling. Tax credits should also be provided to businesses and individuals who provide scholarships for the education of children other than their own.
As we enter an increasingly diverse age, teachers should be encouraged to start their new schools and develop their own curricula. Legal restrictions on the use of innovative teaching methods should be removed. Legal hindrances on the home schooling and private schools should be removed.
Providing college educations is one of Massachusetts' largest and most successful industries. The Commonwealth should cease to determine -- through a State Board of Higher Education -- which private institutes, colleges, and universities may offer which degrees.
Parents are free to choose their childrens' doctors; they should also be free to choose their children's teachers. We condemn the assignment of children to particular schools or academic programs on the basis of the color of their skin or the shape of their eyes.
The Central Massachusetts Liberty Coalition supports the right of parents to choose private, parochial, or home schooling for their children. The Commonwealth should limit its education regulations to public school programs. The distribution of state aid for education to cities and towns should be determined strictly by the number of children enrolled in each school system, not by political deals in the State legislature.
The State University system should stop forcing students to buy health insurance. We condemn the creation of mandatory student fees to support political lobbying organizations.
The Central Massachusetts Liberty Coalition calls for the systematic privatization of state government functions that can equally well be provided by individuals, businesses, charities, universities, and other voluntary groups. The Commonwealth should concentrate on providing true state functions: courts, the criminal justice system, roads, and public safety.
MassPort should be sold to private parties. The proceeds of the sale should be placed into a permanent endowment, profits from the endowment under a fair return rule being used to pay for the legitimate functions of government.
The Massachusetts Turnpike Authority bonds should be paid, and the Authority ended. We endorse the sale of Metropolitan District Commission lands to private conservation and environmental groups, with deed covenants ensuring that the lands will remain as parks or ecological preserves.
The Central Massachusetts Liberty Coalition supports ongoing efforts to privatize garbage collection. There is no reason for municipal governments to compete with private enterprise. Private competition will promote efficiency, reduce landfill volumes, and encourage financially rational recycling programs.
The Social Security system is foundering on the rock of its actuarially-unsound financial structure. Are you 50 years old or younger? Look at your next paycheck. Find your Social Security tax. Kiss your money goodbye. You'll never see it again. Massachusetts cannot completely protect its citizens from the folly of the Federal government, but it can take steps to reduce the impact of unwise Federal policies. In particular:
To help responsible citizens to provide for their retirement, all money placed into retirement accounts should in the year of deposit be exempt from state taxes.
To end unfair taxes that weigh more heavily on the elderly than on the young, income from investments -- including accrued earnings in retirement accounts -- should be taxed at a rate no higher than income from salaries and wages. To those who argue that investment income has not been earned, we answer: saving money is hard work. If you don't believe us, try it.
Small business are the creative backbone of American commerce. From small businesses will arise the Microsofts and Chryslers of the next hundred years. Job creation is the business of small businesses. Fortune 500 companies progressively downsize, but America's small businesses add millions of new jobs every year. Massachusetts' small business owners are the least politically fortunate people in the state, having neither the political connection, nor the voting clout, nor the sympathetic benefactors of other parts of the Commonwealth's body politic. The Central Massachusetts Liberty Coalition stands as the defender of small-business owners across Massachusetts.
The Central Massachusetts Liberty Coalition stands for the lowest achievable level of taxation. Consistent with this goal, the Central Massachusetts Liberty Coalition calls for the abolition of TIFs and other tax reliefs given to politically-connected gladhanders at the expense of the Commonwealth's hard-working small business and property owners.
The Central Massachusetts Liberty Coalition calls for the repeal of laws that irrationally interfere with commerce. Blue laws are archaic and unnecessary. Small business owners should decide for themselves when they wish to be open for business. State laws regulating the price and advertising of goods, or the hours in which goods may be offered for sale, injure every consumer in the state, and should without exception be repealed.
State licensing laws should be replaced by voluntarily certification arrangements paid for by their members. State laws licensing occupations are medieval guild rules in modern guise. The Central Massachusetts Liberty Coalition calls for the repeal of all compulsory licensing laws restricting entry into occupations. By deliberate design, these laws hurt every racial, religious, and ethnic group underrepresented in an occupation.
The State Business Insurance tax on employers of six or more employees is unfair to companies that cannot afford to provide Health Care to their employees, and should be repealed.
Marijuana has medical value for the alleviation of conditions related to AIDS, glaucoma, asthma, and cancer. Massachusetts laws forbidding physicians to recommend the use of marijuana for these and other medical conditions should be repealed. Massachusetts should follow the lead of California and end legal penalties penalizing patients --- and their suppliers -- who use marijuana on recommendation of a physician.
Currently half of all law enforcement money, state and Federal, is spent on marijuana prohibition. Efforts to proscribe the use of marijuana are a near- total failure. The War on Pot fills our jails and prisons with thousands of occasional users, while murderers, rapists, and embezzlers go free for lack of cell space. The Central Massachusetts Liberty Coalition advocates the immediate decriminalization of the possession or cultivation of hemp, cannabis sativa, also known as marijuana.
The Central Massachusetts Liberty Coalition advocates ending all restrictions on non-pharmaceutical uses of hemp. These include restrictions on the use of hemp in the production of paper, clothing, tents, linens, rugs, cordage, bird seed, and biomass as an energy source or chemical feedstock.
The Central Massachusetts Liberty Coalition stands for freedom of religion, the right of individual Americans to worship in such manner as they see fit, as protected by the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. We call for a legal prohibition forbidding the introduction of or reference to a person's religious beliefs in any civil or criminal court procedure.
Marriage is, among other things, a religious sacrament. The state in recognizing marriages is obliged to honor the decisions of various faiths as to which adults may marry. We specifically condemn the so-called Defense of Marriage Act, which transparently violates the Full Faith and Credit Clause of the Constitution and which impinged upon the religious freedom of all Americans.
The Central Massachusetts Liberty Coalition supports freedom of the press, in particular freedom for the electronic press. We condemn efforts of the Clinton-Dole-Gingrich combine to assert government rather than parental control of speech via the Internet Censorship Act, the V-chip, and all restrictions on sale and export of encryption technology. It is particularly futile to ban the export of encryption technology freely available everywhere else in the world, though this ban at least has the beneficial effect of convincing Americans that when the government is incompetent.
The Central Massachusetts Liberty Coalition condemns Federal efforts to convert America into a European police state, in which people must present photographic identification in the form of a government document in order to fly on a commercial airliner or to mail heavy packages. The request `your papers, please?' belongs in films about the WW2 German terror state and has no place in American civic life.
The Central Massachusetts Liberty Coalition condemns civil forfeiture . No property should be seized by the government prior to civil or criminal processes in a court of law. Across America, every year civil forfeiture seizures transfer more property than do all of the burglaries and robberies in the land.
The Central Massachusetts Liberty Coalition condemns mandatory minimum sentences, and calls for their replacement with sentencing guidelines which lead judges or juries towards fair decisions. The notorious California Three Strikes law has put away for life more marijuana possessors than it has put away murderers, rapists, or kidnappers.
The Fourth Amendment belongs to all the people, not just well-to-do older suburban men with good attorneys. The Central Massachusetts Liberty Coalition condemns illegal and unconstitutional random police stops and searches in the absence of probable cause, especially searches that randomly fall upon every youth whose skin is dark or who is wearing the wrong color of clothing.
The Central Massachusetts Liberty Coalition condemns warrantless searches and wiretaps. The Central Massachusetts Liberty Coalition condemns forced 'dynamic entry' techniques, especially those supported by military devices such as distractors, hand grenades, automatic weapons, tanks, and gunfire from helicopters, except in the instance (almost never encountered except on television) in which innocent hostages would otherwise be likely to die. All too often such methods cause the death of innocent people, most horribly by frightening to death the elderly.
We condemn the failed efforts of the United States Secret Service to suppress publication of the book Gurps Cyberpunk by seizing and vandalizing the offices and business equipment of Steve Jackson Games.
The Central Massachusetts Liberty Coalition supports a woman's right to choose whether or not to terminate her pregnancy. Abortion should be a legal medical procedure not restricted by the state, as by laws mandating waiting periods or compelling counselling. We call for the repeal of all state laws regulating or restricting access of women, parents, and families to abortion facilities.
The Central Massachusetts Liberty Coalition condemns the use of tax money to pay for abortions. Millions of pro-life Americans should not be compelled by the onerous hand of the tax collector to pay for acts they see as tantamount to murder.
The sale or use of contraceptives should not be restricted, prohibited, or mandated by the government. The Central Massachusetts Liberty Coalition opposes the public funding of contraceptive sales and distributions. People who do not condone the use of contraceptives should not be forced to pay for them through their taxes.
Laws blocking the import and sale of RU486 should immediately be repealed.
Adoptions should be made easier. Restrictions on who can act as an intermediary, who can adopt, and what fees may be paid should be eliminated. Restrictions on the racial or religious identity of adopting parents should be ended.
The Central Massachusetts Liberty Coalition calls for an end to the War on Drugs. The War on Drugs is the primary cause of gang wars, drive-by shootings, illegal money laundering, and murders in the United States. Just as the end of alcohol prohibition ended mobster involvement in liquor bootlegging, so also will ending the War on Drugs end gang violence for control of drug markets.
The sale and use of hypodermic needles should not be regulated by the Commonwealth.
The Central Massachusetts Liberty Coalition stands for individual liberty, personal responsibility, low taxes, and small government.
We oppose seat belt laws, compulsory motorcycle helmet laws, and compulsory car airbag laws. These choices are best left to the individual.
We support the legalization of gambling and the elimination of the state lottery monopoly.
The government should get out of the bedroom. We support an immediate end to sodomy laws and laws restricting the right of individuals to live in the same home.
The Central Massachusetts Liberty Coalition calls for an end to the ban on tattoo parlors, which are now legal in almost every state in the Union. The current law serves most effectively to move money out of Massachusetts into neighboring states.
The Central Massachusetts Liberty Coalition supports private charity that cares for the unfortunate. The CMLC opposes public welfare programs that transfer money from the Commonwealth's taxpayers to the undeserving but politically well-connected:
We call for the end of corporate welfare, that transfers hundreds of billions of dollars via subsidies, special tax rules, and outright gifts to corporate supporters of political parties.
We call for the end of agricultural welfare, that enriches donors to special PACS at the expensive of every person in the United States.
We call for the end of bond welfare, under which the United States has borrowed five trillion dollars, on which it (properly) pays interest. The national debt is the largest single income-transfer scheme in government, moving money from every worker and taxpayer to the holders of the national debt.
We call for the end of defense welfare, which supports an enormous military machine that faces no serious enemy. The Federal defense and intelligence budgets should be cut be at least 50%. The United States does 40% of the world's military spending, and our allies do the next 40%. Defense welfare encouraged foreign military adventurism in Panama, Somalia, and Bosnia, and lures thousands of our best scientists and engineers into totally nonproductive careers.
We call for the end of welfare for the idle ablebodied, which entices millions of foreigners to cross our borders illegally to take advantage of our charity.
If, twenty years ago, someone had plotted to destroy the medical insurance industry, they would probably failed to find something as destructive to your medicare care as cost transfers, under which hospitals are compelled to provide medical care for the indigent, and have no alternative but charge those costs to the insured sick. The Central Massachusetts Liberty Coalition condemns the cost transfer scheme, which doubles the cost of your medical care. If Massachusetts politicians wish to care for the indigent sick, they should have the moral fortitude to raise the money to pay for it, rather than gouging the money from Massachusetts' most defenseless inhabitants -- insured sick people.
The Central Massachusetts Liberty Coalition believes that Americans may reasonably differ as to whether a truly free society would need or want term limits. In our present, imperfect world, the Central Massachusetts Liberty Coalition supports the imposition of terms limits on all elected government officials. Financial incentives to remain in office, such as pension plans other than those with instantaneous full vesting, should be abolished for elected officials.
We condemn the scheme recently used by Governor Weld and his cronies in the State Legislature increase the state legislature's bloated and undeserved pay. We endorse future efforts to overturn this increase via referendum.