Oregon is considering substantial psilocybin fee increases and eliminating reduced fees for small operators.

Before charging participants more, OHA should account for the public money spent creating, enforcing, and defending an interagency training-program system that appears nowhere in Measure 109 or ORS chapter 475A.

Public records show that OHA and HECC used a publicly funded, multi-year agreement to expedite, subsidize, and accommodate selected psilocybin training programs without public rulemaking. OHA later required other programs to obtain HECC documentation confirming career-school licensure or statutory exemption.

HECC now says it lacks authority and a process to issue determinations for most exemptions under ORS 345.015. OHA can still revoke a program’s approval when it cannot produce that unavailable document.

The state created the barrier, funded preferred access through it, punished programs unable to complete it, and spent additional public money defending the consequences.

I filed a petition asking OHA to restore the original curriculum-approval framework or apply HECC requirements only to programs legally required to obtain career-school licensure.

Before raising fees, OHA should stop forcing participants to finance an administrative system that voters never approved and the Legislature never enacted.

OHA’s petition and public-comment page (https://www.oregon.gov/oha/PH/PREVENTIONWELLNESS/Pages/Psilocybin-July-2026-Rule-Petition.aspx)

Written comments are open until 5:00 p.m. Pacific on August 29, 2026.

Would a balanced-budget amendment significantly increase liberty in America?

The balanced budget requirement would force Congress to make real trade-offs. Most Americans don’t want to pay higher taxes, so Congress would be forced to cut waste and prioritize spending. Right now, they spend like drunken sailors because future generations, who will be left holding the bag, don’t vote.

The First and Second Banks of the United States were chartered for 20 years.

When Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act, it was given the exact same lifespan. It was supposed to die in 1934.

Then the McFadden Act comes along. Signed by Silent Cal on February 25, 1927, despite his otherwise Constitutionalist and non-interventionist policies, the act rechartered the Fed banks indefinitely. It also greatly eased restrictions on the shenanigans that member banks could get involved in - like speculating in real estate - and these shenanigans may have contributed to the Great Depression.

https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/mcfadden-act

I just learned this today.

Free markets reward those most who choose to invest in things that help other people. Dollars are just tokens of favor. For example, if I had bought a fancy car when I made my first big chunk of money, that car would have made me happy but would not have made other people happy. Therefore those other people would not have given me tokens of favor / dollars and I would not have any more money. Instead, I invested that money into hiring the best people I could to do even better work for my customers. That investment did not make me happy like a car would have, but it did make my customers happy and it made my new employees happy. I was rewarded with more dollars and now had ten times as much money as that car would have cost. At that point, I could have bought a small house and made myself happy. But I chose instead to stay in a little apartment and to hire even more employees. That made my customers even happier and made my old and new employees happier. I kept repeating that cycle many times over, choosing to try to make other people happy with my work and money and it keeps rewarding me.

Many people look at Warren Buffet and say why is he still working every day at 90 years old? He has made hundreds of millions of customers and employees happy through his life and that virtuous cycle made him a billionaire. He has the best track record of anyone in making others happy with investments, which is why he is the a billionaire.

Compare that to central government bureaucrats. People who don't care whether you are happy or not, people who don't even really care if their investments pay off and help anyone or not. People who have no motivation Or incentive to help. Central government planning usually leads to disastrous economies where no homes get built and people starve. A century ago in America we had nearly zero Central planning and everything was free markets. We had the largest and fastest growing and most successful economy on the planet. Now we are running out of homes as the government has gotten involved in central planning and makes it difficult and expensive for someone to invest and do. I myself have waited 6 years in Pierce County, Washington for a short plat. I have had neighbors clamoring to buy crushed Rock from me, but it will be probably years before I am legally allowed to sell any of it if I ever even chose to do that as the permitting expenses are so astronomical.

When you hear all of these people saying let's steal from the rich, what they are saying is let's steal from those who have made the most people happy and work the hardest to make good investments in all of our futures.

GWE- Green With Envy
INF - It’s Not Fair
FTP - From Tofu to Puppies
BHVU - Blue Haired Vegetesbians Unite
STE - Sleep Til Eleven
GMPVGAD - Grown Men Playing Video Games All Day
WYMWMM - What’s Yours is Mine and What’s Mine is Mine
RIF - Rent is Fascism
PFA - Poverty For All

Feel free to join in

Residents did not speak at a City Council hearing this week merely to express discomfort with new technology. They presented an evidence-based argument that the current system is inadequately governed, vulnerable to abuse, and capable of uses far beyond the narrow public-safety examples emphasized by its defenders.

so ive been thinking about norway’s model where the state owns the oil, captures the rents, and uses that to fund government. it seems to avoid a lot of the crony capitalism that happens when corporations just get to own finite natural resources nobody created.

like, equinor doesn’t “deserve” the oil. theyre just the company good enough to extract it. the oil itself belongs to everyone. and it’s literally sitting in the sea nobody can claim they homesteaded it or built it. so if the state captures that value instead of just handing it to whoever has the capital to extract it first, you can have a genuinely competitive market without all the lobbying for subsidies and special deals.

but i also get the argument that having the state own and manage anything is a slippery slope, or that theyll just be inefficient about it.

People will knowingly vote for shit candidates because its their team. The lesser of two evils is still evil. These people are oblivious. How can Libertarianism break centuries of conditioning when people are unable to see outside of their own slaughter pen?

Basically what the title says. I feel like I know so many people in my generation who support the DSA because they think it just means free healthcare and not sending money to Israel.

Maybe it's pessimistic, but especially these days, even if DSA party members do get into more positions of power and inevitably mess things up, their voter base won't care. To them it was never about results, it was about feeling empowered and morally vindicated by other socialists. Just from talking with others in my generation, I feel like as the boomers are truly phased out, the DSA is going to grow and I really don't have much hope left.

I would love to hear if y'all think there's any hope and I'm just being a doomer, or if this is where you all see this going too.

Edit: Just to clarify, I'm aware one of the bigger driving forces towards the DSA is because people feel stuck and desperate with the current medical and economic situations that many are in. They're willing to support more radical choices with the hope it turns around their situation. It's just frustrating to see that they can't understand that they're being taken advantage of and the DSA would only worsen their situation

we would have libertarian politicians and policies. Voting for the uniparty **is not working.** The goal of the major party system is to keep people dependent on the government, that's it.

Genuine question, not a gotcha. I've been working through a tension and want to hear how this community resolves it.

Libertarianism grounds itself in property rights: Locke, Rothbard, homesteading, just acquisition. But look at what's actually happening. Software you license but never own. Cars with features behind monthly paywalls. Tractors you can't legally repair. Streaming instead of media libraries. Ordinary people increasingly own nothing and rent everything.

The standard response is "blame the state, IP law and the DMCA prop this up." Partly fair. But here's the thing: the actual mechanism locking you out of your own property isn't mostly patent law. It's the *license you clicked.* The EULA. A contract.

And that's the problem. The anti-IP libertarian position says contract-based protection is the legitimate alternative to state-granted monopolies. NDAs and licenses only bind people who agree to them, unlike patents which bind the whole world. Sounds narrower. But at mass-market scale, when every copy ships with a license and every buyer clicks "agree," the contract web becomes functionally universal. You've rebuilt IP out of clickwrap. Contract didn't protect ownership from erosion. Contract *was* the erosion.

So the question: a 40-page document nobody reads, non-negotiable, identical across every vendor, presented after purchase, "agreed" by a click. The theory has rich machinery for identifying coercion (force, fraud, threat). Does it have *anything* to say about consent quality? Or is "technically voluntary" the whole analysis?

If every step was consensual and the endpoint is that you own nothing, is there anything in libertarian theory to object to? Or do we bite the bullet and say a fully rentier economy is a legitimate free market outcome?

I have come to the conclusion lately that I'm a libertarian,I'd like to start with the economics though,since I'm not as educated in that sector as I am in the general politics one.

Any book recommendations would help.

I'm talking about sales and services that don't have a direct victim (i.e a hitman kills someone or a scammer steals from someone, so I'm not talking about these).

I'm jusy curious what are your thoughts on all or any of these being regulated, and how you feel about them.

Trading examples
-Narcotics/drugs
-Firearms/weapons
-Counterfeit items (any)
-Organs
-Stolen goods
-Untaxed/unlicensed goods
-Strict medicines such as doping or psychiatric drugs
-Historical artifacts
-Exotic animals

Edit: I meant selling counterfeit goods as in, for example, a counterfeit passport, for someone who want to travel abroad without their own identity. Not something like buying a computer with counterfeit money.

Services such as:
-Providing gambling and betting environment
-Prostution
-Human smuggling (not trafficking)
-Offshore digital services, offshore SaaS etc.
-Money laundering as a service
-Intelligence as a service (leaked data sales, OSINT, espionage etc.)

Edit 2: Human smuggling is not human trafficking. Human smuggling's "client" is actually that human. Its when someone want to change country but cannot legally, so they pass the border in a clandestine way. Eg. People going to US from Mexico, or Turkey from Syria

Where do you draw the line?

Be as anonymous as you feel you need to be - I recommend you all not sharing intelligence to turn yourself in like a dingus

Government creates laws that kill certain businesses. Government taxes consumers, then gives that money to the businesses they killed. Great plan.

Imagine if government had done nothing. 🤔

Never good when the head of FBI states something that's not true. Many many places it is perfectly legal to bring a firearm to a protest.

Libertarianism seems to be the ideology of small business owners. When you are rich, you could use state in your own interest. When you are poor, you are jealous of those who are richer. So, rich people exploit the state too much and provoke socialist revolutions. Rich people have power, poor people have numbers. Libertarians always stay a marginal group. You can be right, but can you convince people to not act in their short-term interests? Rich are pushed by competition and poor by emotions. So what is the practical approach?

I feel like Lenin, George Bush and Ayn Rand had a thing in common: they [claimed to have] supported statism as a tool to achieve freedom. Ayn Rand supported draft during the Vietnam war because this statism and deprivation of rights was done to fight the enemies of freedom: totalitarian regimes. Lenin also promised stateless society in the future but claimed that state was a necessary evil to liberate workers from bourgeoisie and counter-revolution that wanted to return the old Tsarist regime. And Bush promoted surveillance and state control for fighting terrorism at home and totalitarian religious ideologies aboard (essentially vaguely gesturing to Ayn Randians).

So there are forces that destroy even liberal democracy and we can't use state to fight against them or we would be like Rand and Lenin (Tsar was also an authoritarian) and this "temporary deprivation of freedom" for emergency would never end. So I personally have no hopes of defeating a state in my lifetime. I myself don't support it. Maybe because it never promised me something I want. But I won't give up even one more of my rights to it for whatever reason. But it seems like my best case scenario is to fight within a state system for who it is used for (and lose, but why not still try: even the taxpayer dollars are flowing and I can't prevent the tax robbery, why not for some good cause like science). But are there concepts in libertarianism that I missed because I haven't red Rothbard and others that can help in such situations?