Formerly in 2nd place, the USA is now ranked #18 among economically free nations.

This disturbing fact, among many others, prompted the University of Utah Young Americans for Liberty chapter to raise awareness of the repressive Progressive Tax system that has failed the American people.

From 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., YAL members (including Claire Sorenson and Michael Ukkested, pictured above) stopped passing students, asking them to participate in the "Progressive Tax Game" to be eligible to win a Jamba Juice gift card.

Those who stopped received money based on their GPAs, with more successful students receiving the least amount of money, thus simulating the progressive tax system. Once students were given their money (typically only $20), they got to choose where their "tax dollars" went from categories like infrastructure, healthcare, the department of education and (the protest bag) "Don't Take My Cash!."

By the end of the day, YAL at the U of U had educated nearly 100 passersby about the oppressive US tax system and also invited each participant to a round-table discussion on economic issues later in the week.

Here's a rather striking update from the Young Americans for Liberty chapter at The College of New Jersey. From left-to-right, we have Kevin Adams (Outreach Coordinator,) Gregory Burr (SFL Campus Coordinator and YAL activist,) Hannah Park (President and Founder,) and Marilyn Guerra (Vice President).

Recently, we have had many meetings with the Student Government committee and have run into ridiculous free-speech issues that have infringed on both our personal liberties and rights as students and as an organization. The committee deemed that we were too similar to the Students for Liberty group on campus, and because SFL was established just last semester on campus, they could not grant both organizations official establishment on campus. They stated that if we had come before SFL, they would have readily allowed us to go through the system with ease.

If you don't know what Skyrim is, then we probably couldn't be friends.  For those of you who aren't as nerdy as me, I'm sorry.  Hopefully even without basic knowledge of Skyrim, some of the economics will still come through.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim was released on November 11, 2011, and is objectively one of the greatest video games ever made.  To those who don't know what it is, you can basically think of Skyrim as a big medieval/fantasy themed roll playing game where you run around and fight dragons and stuff.  (Even though it's so much more than that).

One of the neatest things about Skyrim is that the player is often forced to actually manufacture weapons, armor, home materials, potions, and other items.  In this process of manufacturing goods, Skyrim reinforces one of the basic assumptions on which capitalism is based -- that being that the vast majority of human beings are capable of producing more value than they consume.  One way that individuals do this is by taking inputs and turning them into outputs.  For example, a bunch of silicon, plastic, and metal in my hands is just a bunch of fairly useless stuff, but in the right hands these things can be made into an iPod -- something very useful.

In Skyrim, one thing that a character can do is become a blacksmith.  As one specializes further and further in blacksmithing, one is able to use more and more complex inputs to produce more valuable outputs, using the same amount of overall labor as before.  Consider the following examples.

The beginning of the semester looked bright for the freshly forming Young Americans for Liberty at Harper College. We had members of our club as voting members on student senate and we thought we really could accomplish things on campus;.

But due to the rules at Harper that allow the Student Senate President and her executive board to appoint voting members and not have elections for these student representatives, she was able to strip one of our members of their voting rights and restrict other members of our club from obtaining voting rights.  At first we were discouraged but then became outraged.  Then we decided as a club that we needed to change things on campus to allow students to elect their representatives in the Senate. 

So for 5 weeks we planned, lobbied the student senators, and brushed up on Roberts Rules of order.  Then, on Friday Oct 19, we carried out our plan during the Student Senate meeting.  We made sure to bring one of our club members who happens to be a writer for the school newspaper along as well.  We immediately put our plan to suspend the rules in place, which led to all out trench fight between the senators and the executive board. 

The executive board was trying to appoint new voting members that day, which according to the Constitution was not allowed because appointments can only happen before the fifth week of school.  The senators, on the other hand, were trying to make the representatives (non-voting members) become senators and be given the right to vote.  These representatives happened to be members of YAL and were not allowed beforehand to vote because of our views.  The floor fight lasted for over an hour, and ended with a recess. 

The recess took place because the senators demanded that the executive board review everything and come back with a decision to allow our previous representative to become senators.  After the fifteen minute recess the executive board came back and granted all of YAL’s members on Student Senate their voting rights and even gave voting rights back to the Senator who was stripped of his rights at the beginning of the year.  When these senators were appointed it became clear to us that Young Americans for Liberty now has the majority vote in our Senate! 

Keeping with the great libertarian conspiracy that we want to take over, so we can leave you alone, our first plan of action will be to petition the students to implement open voting for Student Senators, and with our majority vote on the Senate we will ensure that it gets passed.  I want to thank our members Kristie Constabileo, Sahand Tsay, and Devarshi Patel for playing such a pivotal part in making this success happen!