RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/?p=69432
Last weekend a small but well-armed and -armored federal task force under the Bureau of Land Management was forced to back off in the face of a group of unarmed (or lightly-armed) patriots on horseback and on foot in a gully near Bunkerville, Nevada. The courageous citizens who approached the federal barriers were told by bullhorn that they would be shot if they came any further, but they kept coming anyway.

This was a huge victory for those American patriots who want to re-establish the rule of law under the United States Constitution. For the past two days I’ve been browsing patriot networks, Second Amendment sites, and YouTube channels, and it’s clear that the libertarian resistance has been electrified by what happened at the Bundy Ranch. Ordinary citizens stood up to the federal government, and the feds backed down.

However, as most of us surmised on Saturday, this was merely a tactical retreat on the part of the BLM and the Obama administration. We are now in a “pay no attention to that man behind the curtain” situation, which is untenable from the point of view of the federal government. In order to work their will upon the American people, the feds must be seen as invincible. But they aren’t — they’ve just proven that they don’t have the guts required to gun down patriotic citizens in cold blood. They have no broad-based support among the people — all they have is fiat money and the unlimited firepower that money can buy.

The invincibility of the federal behemoth must be re-established, and quickly, so expect a Round Two. According to the following report from a reader named Warren Smith, the BLM has backed off from the Bundy Ranch, but has not departed the area. They may well be planning further operations in that part of Nevada.

http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/?p=69429
Irwin M. Stelzer is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard, director of economic policy studies at the Hudson Institute, and a columnist for the Sunday Times (London).
“The dinosaurs surviving the crunch” was how Stephen Sondheim described women living an outdated lifestyle and grimly aware that “everybody dies.” If Sondheim had the slightest interest in the less exalted subject of economics, he would apply that descriptive to a host of companies and industries trying to beat the hooded man with a scythe, aided by their regulators.

The most recent example comes to us courtesy of New Jersey’s automobile dealers—with an assist from their regulators and Governor Chris Christie—who have decided to follow the lead of Texas, Maryland, and Virginia and declare that Tesla, the maker of electric cars, has violated state law by attempting to sell its cars through its own network of stores rather than through franchised dealers. The New Jersey Coalition of Automotive Retailers (NJCAR), feeling threatened by a firm that sells fewer cars in a year than General Motors sells in a day, contends that the regulations do nothing more than bring Tesla into line with other manufacturers to create a level playing field, the sort on which beleaguered competitors prefer to compete so long as the referee/regulator is on their team. For “level playing field” read status quo.

If Tesla is allowed to eliminate the middleman, Ford, General Motors, and other manufacturers will follow suit, whines NJCAR. Yes, the consumer would save money, but if Governor Christie allowed this new and possibly more efficient method of distribution to take hold in New Jersey, he would surely lose lots of dealer votes and their financial support. So Christie, no stranger to issues in the transportation sector, told Tesla it can keep its stores as galleries but not discuss price or take orders. Any orders would have to be placed in stores in other states (Texas does not allow any such referrals), which would of course reap the sales taxes associated with the sales. Other states are under pressure from dealer organizations to follow New Jersey’s lead, or at minimum New York’s, where the governor and the legislature have cut a deal to allow Tesla to keep its five stores—but no more.