Author Archive
Michael F. Cannon on Susan G. Komen and Planned Parenthood
Sunday, February 5th, 2012I liked Cato's Michael F. Cannon's take on the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation's decision to suspend its partnership with and funding of Planned Parenthood: First, this controversy provides a delightful contrast to the Obama administration’s decision to force all Americans to purchase contraceptives and subsidize abortions. The Susan G. ...
Quote of the day
Saturday, February 4th, 2012The very same faction that pretended for years to be so distraught by Bush’s mere eavesdropping on and detention of accused Terrorists without due process is now perfectly content to have their own President kill accused Terrorists without due process, even when those targeted are their fellow citizens. —Glenn Greenwald, on ...
Maybe free speech is less popular than I thought
Friday, February 3rd, 2012I had a bizarre experience yesterday: I encountered two people who were wrong on the internet who asserted that words can harm people and so their (mis)use should be punishable by law. I don't mean using libel or slander to harm someone's reputation, which should not be considered crimes anyway. ...
PCIPA: another internet-censoring, privacy-violating bill that goes overboard
Wednesday, February 1st, 2012I was impressed by this article in The Atlantic by Conor Friedersdorf about the Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act of 2011 (PCIPA), The Legislation That Could Kill Internet Privacy for Good. This article was written on August 1, 2011, and apparently the bill, H.R. 1981, is almost a year ...
How long will the SOPA protests be successful?
Sunday, January 29th, 2012In my more cynical moods, I think that Westerners' complacency in political and economic matters and their comfort levels with life in general will make their recent victories against internet censorship mere footnotes to the history of State encroachment into our online lives. In other words, lawmakers, lobbyists, and other ...
Two recent political sports stories
Wednesday, January 25th, 2012Boston Bruins' goaltender and last year's Conn Smythe Trophy winner (Stanley Cup Playoffs MVP) Tim Thomas declined to visit the White House to celebrate his team's Stanley Cup championship last season. His reasons were basically political, as he detailed in a Facebook message: I believe the Federal government has grown out ...
Quote of the day
Sunday, January 22nd, 2012"People don’t want ‘a better clothes dryer’, they want to be able to spend less time washing clothes and thus more time writing novels or playing with their children or fishing or what have you." —Z. Caceres on the benefits and desirability of economic growth
Links for an ending week
Friday, January 20th, 2012President Obama deserves praise for opposing the SOPA/PIPA bills in the House and Senate, respectively, but, of course, in true Republocrat fashion, deserves further criticism for qualifying that with, "That is why the Administration calls on all sides to work together to pass sound legislation this year that provides prosecutors ...
Union-negotiated protections are apparently only okay when people agree with the outcomes
Friday, January 6th, 2012Libertarians and anarchists who don't add the "left-" moniker or some other adjective advertising how pro-union or pro-"worker" they are often get accused of opposing unions or unionization in general. Few misrepresentations of libertarians are farther from the truth. I have found myself to be quite pro-union, especially when looking ...
Hypocrites silent as Obama authorizes military detention of American citizens
Monday, January 2nd, 2012One of the most unfortunate aspects of America's democratic process and its current state here at the beginning of 2012 is the nearly compete absence of discussion of some central issues by most people, along with their failure to acknowledge that those issues even exist and their complete hypocrisy regarding ...
Quote of the day
Tuesday, December 13th, 2011How do politicians who arrive in Washington, D.C. as men and women of modest means leave as millionaires? How do they miraculously accumulate wealth at a rate faster than the rest of us? How do politicians' stock portfolios outperform even the best hedge-fund managers'? I answered the question in that ...
More of Obama’s green bubble: subsidizing Wall Street to buy Chinese solar panels
Saturday, December 10th, 2011I liked this column by T.J. Rodgers in the Wall Street Journal, Subsidizing Wall Street to Buy Chinese Solar Panels. It explains how American consumers are not the ones who benefit from the Obama administration's subsidies on the purchase of household solar panels. It's a nice, short economics lesson on ...
Stop the Stop Online Piracy Act!
Saturday, November 12th, 2011The latest attempt from the parasites in Washington to limit the freedom of the internet and all of the benefits that stem from it is called the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). Its more official, full name is Enforcing and Protecting American Rights Against Sites Intent on Theft and Exploitation ...
Guaranteed student debt guarantees the need for student debt
Saturday, October 22nd, 2011The ongoing Occupy movement has produced myriad versions of the "we are the 99%" lament, complaining that 99% of us have been taken advantage of and outright wronged by the richest 1% of individuals who control the financial sector and the governments of our society. I've found myself surprisingly sympathetic ...
Google shifted profits offshore to avoid taxes. Good for them!
Thursday, October 13th, 2011The IRS is investigating how Google shifted some of its profits to offshore subsidiaries to avoid paying taxes on them. Good for Google! I have displayed varying degrees of vocality in my disappointment or disapproval of some of Google's practices in the past, such as the creepiness and Orwellianness of ...
Quote of the day
Friday, October 7th, 2011Sheldon Richman summarizes the State. It's a shame more people don't see how barbaric and completely childish Statism is in so many ways: Most people would agree that the sign of an individual’s maturity and rationality, not to mention social skills, is her understanding that the cooperation of others must be ...
Amanda Knox’s acquittal
Thursday, October 6th, 2011I was extremely happy to learn that Amanda Knox had finally been acquitted of murdering her roommate Meredith Kercher in Italy in 2007 when they were exchange students. You could tell that justice prevailed because Nancy Grace thought the opposite. I thought the case against Amanda Knox was so circumstantial and ...
Farhad Manjoo is a raging moron and a danger to society
Tuesday, August 2nd, 2011It's a good thing Slate.com columnist Farhad Manjoo isn't a historian, or he'd probably argue that the best solution to slavery in America would have been to allow blacks an equal chance to enslave white people, because that would be "fair" in his biased, uninformed, unimaginative mind. Amazon.com is resisting the ...
Neighbors helping neighbors in a disaster: voluntary cooperation and spontaneous order
Sunday, July 17th, 2011I liked this NPR report by Shankar Vedantam about friends and communities helping each other after (and even before) natural disasters and the failure of government agencies to help them very much when it really matters. The article on the website is similar to the radio report, but with more ...
Big government, big corporations, corn syrup, and Galco’s Soda Pop Stop
Saturday, July 16th, 2011This video seems to be popular with the kids around the internets this week. It's about Galco's Soda Pop Stop in Los Angeles, a small, independent soda pop store that seems to sell mostly drinks that I've never heard of, many of which I'm assuming are also made by small ...
Because in a free society, unfettered corporations would prey on poor, defenseless individuals and extort them for illegitimate and non-consensual “protection fees”
Thursday, July 14th, 2011Yankees fan Christian Lopez, who caught Derek Jeter's 3000th career hit, which was a home run, could owe an extra $14,000 in income taxes next year due to the value of the seats and other perks the Yankees rewarded him in exchange for giving them the ball back and not ...
The existence of the TSA is the point
Monday, July 4th, 2011You might have read or heard about this story from Florida in which a 95-year-old wheelchair-bound woman was required to remove her adult diaper to be inspected by the Transportation Security Administration last month. You might not have heard that the 95-year-old woman was actually calm and acquiescent during the ...
Economic prosperity and “going green”
Wednesday, May 11th, 2011The New York Times reports that American consumers no longer want to splurge on environmentally friendly but more expensive products now that their financial outlook isn't so good. But America’s eco-consciousness, it turns out, is fickle. As recession gripped the country, the consumer’s love affair with green products, from recycled toilet ...
Bin Laden reaction roundup
Sunday, May 8th, 2011I have been much more interested in the various and sundry reactions, mainly from Americans, to Osama bin Laden's killing than to the news itself. The whole situation ought to inspire quite a bit of mixed feelings from any libertarian, and even from any sensible, sympathetic human being. Notwithstanding the ...
End-of-the-month links
Saturday, April 30th, 2011Amazon.com's cancellation of its plans to open a South Carolina distribution center and high-tailing it out of town because the state legislature voted against giving the company a tax exemption are interesting from a libertarian perspective for a couple reasons. First, from a principled anti-tax standpoint, this is one of ...
Liberty is founded in equality
Wednesday, April 27th, 2011I was pleased to find out Charles Johnson's essay Liberty, Equality, Solidarity: Toward a Dialectical Anarchism is available online and not just in the very expensive book it was written for, Anarchism/Minarchism: Is a Government Part of a Free Country? This essay is such a tour de force that quoting ...
40 things Bryan Caplan has learned
Sunday, April 10th, 2011Bryan Caplan wrote a great post for his 40th birthday: 40 Things I Learned in My First 40 Years. Not only is it full of good philosophy and rules of thumb, it has tons of links, none of which I am going to a href for you. In no particular order: Economics 1. ...
Hierarchy, authority, authoritarianism, left-libertarianism
Saturday, April 9th, 2011I liked Kinsella's blag post Hierarchy, Authority, Authoritarianism, Left-Libertarianism and, especially, the comments therein. Reprinting his responses to a Facebook thread, Kinsella said: This use of “hierarchy” and “command” to cover both coercive (the state) and voluntary, non-coercive institutions (church, family, corporation) is equivocation. We libertarians do not oppose hierarchy or ...
Sign of the apocalypse
Tuesday, March 22nd, 2011Not only do I agree with everything currently on Michael Moore's Twitter page, I actually kind of enjoyed reading it. I think I enjoyed reading the last several days of his posts because he's exhibiting some admirable principle in excoriating Obama and the Democrats for intervening in Libya's civil war ...
Democrats’ same old “raise taxes” crap
Thursday, March 17th, 2011After 8 years of Republican deficits, inflation, cronyism, and war, the liberal Democrats of this country had a nice opportunity to accomplish something worthwhile, or at least stand for something new and different. Their motto was "hope" and "change", and even if we knew their President and their Congress weren't ...
Big government is only possible because of previous free enterprise, not the other way around
Monday, March 14th, 2011Libertarians should be familiar with the position that the mixed-economy socialism much of the Western world lives under is only affordable because previous decades of relative freedom have enabled a level of economic production and a climate of trust, mutual dependability, and competition that produced the wealth that could (relatively ...
Locavores want to have their cake and eat it, too
Thursday, February 24th, 2011I just typed that title and didn't realize until after typing it that it was quite a good pun. A perfect example of no pun intended! This post does have a point. I really liked this post from a blag called The Whited Sepulchre. It rants against "locavores" who want to ...
Guns and freedom: a different argument
Wednesday, February 23rd, 2011I liked this post by David Friedman, mainly the end: In my view, the real argument for private firearm ownership is a different one. The less able individuals are to protect themselves from crime, the more dependent they are on protection by government law enforcement. The more dependent they are on ...
Government-enforced net neutrality
Tuesday, February 1st, 2011The only part of the phrase "government-enforced net neutrality" that is relevant is the "government-enforced" part. There are so many arguments against the position that the Imperial Federal Government should enforce net neutrality that I had a hard time knowing where to begin. They include: Most problems with cable companies ...
Kent McManigal’s Bubble Theory of Property Rights
Tuesday, January 25th, 2011I liked Kent McManigal's text-to-speech video delineating his Bubble Theory of Property Rights. His theory and the concepts and language he uses to explain it are in complete agreement with my "sphere of liberty" model of self-ownership and non-aggression, which I've summarized here (although, as I thought about when I ...
Julian Sanchez on politically motivated suppression of WikiLeaks
Saturday, December 11th, 2010I really enjoyed Julian Sanchez's entire post Wikileaks and "Economies of Repression", but the conclusion was the best: In the heady days of the 1990s, it was widely assumed that the global Internet was, by its nature, an anarchic zone of untrammeled speech inherently immune from the control of governments quite ...
Yes, it is absolute, and no, it is not debatable
Wednesday, December 8th, 2010In any discussion of libertarian anarchism or even basic free-market economics with someone who is not very libertarian, a libertarian is likely to encounter a response to the effect of, "Well, I see your point about individual freedom and government power, but I believe that everything should have its limits ...
Loose lips sink dictatorships
Saturday, December 4th, 2010Seen on the internet, from someone who originally saw it in Barcelona, presumably inspired by Obama's opposition to WikiLeaks:
Two totalitarian laws closer to being enacted
Friday, November 19th, 2010You might have heard about two awful, totalitarian, Orwellian laws that the Senate is close to passing, which would unquestionably make our lives worse and cement this Democratic Congress as one of the worst in our history. The Senate Judiciary Committee recently approved the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act ...
Tim Andrews impersonates Alex Jones
Thursday, November 18th, 2010Even though nobody who reads this page cares about or even knows about the Regular Guys, an Atlanta morning radio show, you might still get a kick out of Tim Andrews's impersonation of Alex Jones of infowars.com. His impersonations are one of the reasons he's my favorite Regular Guy. This ...
Because in an anarchic society, gangs of thugs would kidnap newborn babies because of the beliefs or affiliations of the parents
Saturday, November 13th, 2010I postponed writing about this travesty because the only page I could find about it was at infowars.com, but the affidavit seems legit and there some videos about the story online, such as this Fox News clip. Basically, New Hampshire state thugs kidnapped Johnathon Irish's and Stephanie Taylor's newborn baby ...
Veterans’ Day quote of the day
Thursday, November 11th, 2010I thought it was a nice coincidence that this quote from Robert Higgs appeared at the top of the page in our random quote generator the first time I opened our blag today: This is the true lesson of our history: war, preparation for war, and foreign military interventions have served ...
Incrementalism and agorism
Thursday, November 11th, 2010I liked my response to this post by David Z. enough to re-print it here, especially because I thought of it all on the fly. It basically summarizes why anarcho-libertarians shouldn't be so dogmatic and exclusive that we alienate or ostracize advocates of limited government who might not want to ...
Links for an ending week
Friday, November 5th, 2010The Fraud Started at the Very Top: With Government Leaders, from Washington's Blag. See their numerous examples of how rating agencies, the Treasury Department, the SEC, the Federal Reserve, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and others committed fraud and helped banks commit fraud. This is truly a devastating list of criminality ...
The science of libertarian morality
Friday, November 5th, 2010That is the title of an article by Ronald Bailey at Reason about a recently published psychological survey comparing libertarians, conservatives, and liberals. The survey's findings were interesting, if unsurprising: It will not surprise Reason readers that the study found that libertarians show (1) stronger endorsement of individual liberty as their ...
Jim Breuer on democracy
Saturday, October 23rd, 2010I really liked actor-comedian Jim Breuer's perspective on politics and democracy on the Regular Guys Show on Friday, October 22, 2010. He was an in-studio guest, and he stuck around for the last news segment of the morning. When the news guy brought up the local elections and the fact ...
That refusal-to-put-out-house-fire story
Thursday, October 7th, 2010Only this morning did I hear about the South Fulton, TN, fire department responding to a house fire but then declining to put the fire out because the homeowners had not paid the annual $75 protection fee. I thought about using this story to explore some issues of statism and ...
Crying ‘racism’ makes it worse
Sunday, October 3rd, 2010If you follow interesting sports like baseball, football, hockey, and golf, then that will necessarily occasionally expose you to coverage and discussion of worthless sports like basketball. This also means you have to listen to at least a little bit of the insufferable blathering of basketball players and commentators. If ...
China’s 25-year government-bloat plan
Saturday, October 2nd, 2010According to Thomas Friedman, China is doing moon shots. Yes, that’s plural. When I say “moon shots” I mean big, multibillion-dollar, 25-year-horizon, game-changing investments. China has at least four going now: one is building a network of ultramodern airports; another is building a web of high-speed trains connecting major cities; a ...