Archive for May, 2008
Obligatory post about Memorial Day
Monday, May 26th, 2008MSN has a quiz about "military myths"; hmmm, I wonder why they left out the one about wars and military interventions protecting our freedoms or doing anything else good for the country. Jacob G. Hornberger wrote the definitive short essay about why the troops and the military of the Imperial Federal ...
Why the State is different
Saturday, May 24th, 2008...there are two general means whereby human beings can satisfy their needs and desires. One is by work—i.e., by applying labor and capital to natural resources for the production of wealth, or to facilitating the exchange of labor-products. This is called the economic means. The other is by robbery—i.e., the ...
In which John violates Godwin’s Rule in the interest of history
Saturday, May 24th, 2008Those familiar with Godwin's Law might be able to guess why I usually refer to it as Godwin's Rule: the Rule is that you shouldn't break Godwin's Law by comparing any person, group, ideas, or practices to Hitler or the Nazis, lest your argument be delegitimized immediately. Well, when the ...
Child faces prosecution for calling the Cult of Scientology a cult
Saturday, May 24th, 2008Jacob Sullum reports at Reason's Hit and Run that a British teenager has been summoned to court and faces a fine (and, presumably, a mark on his criminal record) for holding a sign outside of the Cult of Scientology London headquarters with the word "cult" on it. I don't understand ...
Inflation in Zimbabwe
Saturday, May 24th, 2008Maybe you're familiar with Zimbabwe's brutal racist dictatorship commanded by Robert Mugabe, its runaway inflation, its millions of starved and murdered people, and its hotly contested recent elections. Well, at least there's some humor to be had in all this, at least from our perspective as comfortable Westerners. One Ian ...
What if climate-change alarmists are right?
Friday, May 23rd, 2008Max Borders presents a pretty good case as to why State solutions to those problems are worse than the problems themselves.
Juror conscription is not a civic duty
Friday, May 23rd, 2008I wonder if anyone but myself, who is pretty thoroughly obsessed with quotations from famous figures throughout history, enjoys our random quote generator that Kel put at the top of our page. (He didn't write the code, he just put it up there; the plugin is by Dustin Barnes.) I ...
Ron Paul and Obama on USSR, Iran
Friday, May 23rd, 2008Hey, Will Bunch: since you are probably still concerned with the reasons intelligent, informed Americans hold stupid, State-loving journalists like yourself in such low esteem, here is yet another example for you: Who said the following: Here’s the truth: the Soviet Union had thousands of nuclear weapons, and Iran doesn’t have a ...
To the Home Office, everyone is a terrorist suspect
Thursday, May 22nd, 2008It's a shame George Orwell didn't foresee the advent of computers and the computer age because if he had, 1984 would have been so much more frightening. The Home Office of Great Britain plans to create "Big brother" database for phones calls, emails and web use. This fascism hasn't been ...
Libertarian Party nomination
Wednesday, May 21st, 2008Link-and-run time: I agree with pretty much every word of this post by Roderick Long, who, despite his agorist commitments, endorses anarcho-capitalist Mary Ruwart for the LP nomination.
Protest = Terrorism
Tuesday, May 20th, 2008That's the point we're coming to under this national-security state in 21st-century America. Republicans and Democrats and the people who continue to support them like a battered wife who won't leave her abusive husband are to blame. Karen De Coster on the LRC blag: If you are going to St. ...
Tyrannicide
Saturday, May 17th, 2008Last night I finished watching the first season of the HBO historical drama Rome, on DVD. It was absolutely fantastic and I highly recommend it to anyone and everyone. The DVD set is worth almost any price they are likely to charge. They only made two seasons and won't make ...
Federalism and gay marriage
Saturday, May 17th, 2008I came across a blag that supports the Libertarian Party in the name of gay, lesbian, and bixexual rights, Outright Libertarians, and its proprietor, Brian Miller, has been writing a lot about the ruling by the California Supreme Court that California's illegalization of gay marriages was unconstitutional. In an example ...
Anarchy and law and order
Saturday, May 17th, 2008That's it. Anthony Gregory is my favorite political writer. Living, that is. I mean, no one could ever surpass Bastiat, Mencken, and Rothbard. His latest achievement is a beautiful explanation of how anarchy would promote order and natural law better than Statism does. I urge everyone of every political variety to ...
THAT is real journalism!
Saturday, May 17th, 2008Keith Olbermann gets a bad rap from libertarians because of his left-liberal socialism and the rarity of a dissenting commentator ever appearing as a guest on his show. Not having watched or heard much from him, I can't back up the latter accusation, but I've watched enough to know the ...
They graciously hand down our rights
Thursday, May 15th, 2008We should…be able to see that our interest would be best served not by asking the state to promulgate our values but by forbidding the state to promulgate any values at all. If the state can espouse some value that we love, it can, with equal justice, espouse others we ...
“Ralph’s ambition is to one day become a politician”
Thursday, May 15th, 2008Take a moment and read this article. No, really. You'll thank me. In fact, allow me to reproduce parts of it here for your enjoyment. Essentially, a kid in Texas - Ralph, whom I imagine looks kinda like this - stole his father's credit card and proceeded to run up a ...
Google’s Quote of the Day
Thursday, May 15th, 2008For those of you that have a personalized google page, I certainly hope y'all noticed the quote of the day. Sitting beside my news bar - which is filled with news about Bush's vision for the middle east, and the Edwards endorsement of Obama - lays a quote by Lord Acton, ...
Genetic-discrimination legislation scares me
Sunday, May 11th, 2008The journal Nature had a news story about the bill prohibiting genetic discrimination that breezed through the Senate and that will undoubtedly become law very shortly. Since you'd have to have access to the full content of the Nature website to read it, I will paste the text of the ...
Shoddy but equal
Sunday, May 11th, 2008In the UK, hospital maternity wards have been rejecting pregnant women because they are full. Well, it's something to look forward to here.
Happy Mother’s Day
Sunday, May 11th, 2008It was considered a pretty stupid idea back when it was introduced as a potential official holiday in the Senate.
Coercion, not persuasion or enterprise, is the answer
Saturday, May 10th, 2008for environmentalists, claims Ann Pettifor on the BBC website. Paul Hawken, author of Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being, writes that "there are over one - maybe even two - million organisations (worldwide) working toward ecological sustainability and social justice". And yet... and yet... there ...
The economy is worse than you know
Saturday, May 10th, 2008I must offer a small retraction and an apology to at least a small number of MSM-print journalists out there because apparently some of them still do some worthy political commentating and question the establishment on serious matters. Kevin Phillips of Harper's Magazine wrote sort of an exposé on the ...
Defeating their own arguments
Saturday, May 10th, 2008I'm surprised I haven't blagged about any of the posts on one of my new favorite libertarian sites, Rad Geek People's Daily, Charles Johnson's blag. He wrote a long and entertaining post about three rural-Minnesota 8th-graders who were suspended for sitting during the Pledge of Allegiance. My favorite part of ...
Libertarian lyrics
Saturday, May 10th, 2008I think the Eagles, like most music artists, and particularly their main songwriters, Don Henley and Glenn Frey, have the reputation of being quite liberal. For instance, Don Henley founded the Walden Woods Project, a non-profit effort to buy land in and around Walden Pond to preserve it from development. ...
Caleb Campbell is neither a hero nor a coward
Friday, May 9th, 2008This is the true lesson of our history: war, preparation for war, and foreign military interventions have served for the most part not to protect us, as we are constantly told, but rather to sap our economic vitality and undermine our civil and economic liberties. —Robert Higgs It was a national sports ...
Anarchy is workable, Statism is not
Friday, May 9th, 2008An entire month ago, Francois Tremblay wrote a blag post, Statism is Utopian that I blagged about here. In the comments, I told him I thought he was incorrect in his assertion that an unworkable situation can proceed from a workable situation but that a workable situation cannot proceed from ...
TANSTAAFSTVARS
Friday, May 9th, 2008BBC News claims, "A free satellite television and radio service backed by the BBC and ITV launches across the UK." I hope even my non-libertarian friends aren't fooled by any government's claim that something is "free"; obviously it is funded by money that was taken at the point of a ...
Ecological and Austrian theory
Wednesday, May 7th, 2008I'm in more of a link-and-run mood than a quote-and-philosophize mood (read: I'm short on time lately), so here's an interesting blag post from Liberty & Power: Ecological and Austrian theory, about the similarities between ecosystems and economic markets and the disconnect between people who advocate a "hands-off" or laissez-faire ...
Hillary and Obama differ on economics
Monday, May 5th, 2008So claims David Leonhardt of the New York Times. Well, obviously that is completely stupid. He writes, For all the similarities between the two Democrats, there is also a core thematic difference between them. Mrs. Clinton tends to favor narrowly focused programs, like the gas-tax holiday, that speak to specific voter ...
Young Americans aren’t angry enough about foreign policy
Thursday, May 1st, 2008A high school student named Peter Fulham published an opinion column in USA Today complaining that young Americans are not demonstrably angry enough about the war in Iraq and the aggressive American foreign policy. Young people are tired of hearing about Iraq, and they gave up getting angry about its ...
Market anarchist blag carnival
Thursday, May 1st, 2008See the 14th monthly market anarchist blag carnival, at Radical Libertarian. I submitted my post about the abolition of government schools, from early in the month. There's lots of other good entries, but I haven't come close to getting through all of them. Thanks to Francois Tremblay for introducing me to ...