Author Archive
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 ...
Profit is vital to human well-being
Tuesday, September 28th, 2010"Profit is vital to human well-being. Profit is the payment to entrepreneurs just as wages are payments to labor, interest to capital and rent to land. In order to earn profits in free markets, entrepreneurs must identify and satisfy human wants and do so in a way that economizes on ...
Danah Boyd on the Craigslist “Adult Services” ban
Sunday, September 12th, 2010I liked this column by Danah Boyd at HuffPo explaining why censoring the "Adult Services" section of Craigslist, effectively forbidding women from prostituting themselves semi-openly, will harm women by protecting pimps, child traffickers, and other abusive scumbags: On Friday, under tremendous pressure from US attorneys general and public advocacy groups, Craigslist ...
The left believe lies and propagate misconceptions, too
Thursday, August 26th, 2010I was not impressed by this blag post by Timothy Egan, even though several of my friends were (according to Facebook). I mean, all of his points were good and worth making, but the immense hypocrisy of the blag post and liberal Democrats in general makes me skeptical that any ...
Another perspective on small business in the era of Big Government
Wednesday, August 25th, 2010I liked this blag post by Philip Greenspun about how his small business suffers, both in absolute terms and relative to the competition, in the face of more government, more regulations, and more lobbyists. One reason I liked it might be because it fits in with our original goal in ...
Great insight from John Taylor Gatto
Monday, August 23rd, 2010LewRockwell.com reprinted the preface to The Underground History of American Public Education by John Taylor Gatto, and it had some quote-worthy passages: I want to open up concealed aspects of modern schooling such as the deterioration it forces in the morality of parenting. You have no say at all in choosing ...
It’s not your fucking business
Friday, August 20th, 2010Roger Clemens has been indicted for "obstruction of Congress" because he lied to them in 2008 when he told them, "Let me be clear. I have never taken steroids or hGH." The Imperial Federal Government has decided it can take people's lives, liberty, and property for putting certain substances into ...
Victims
Saturday, August 14th, 2010In Atlanta last Wednesday and Thursday, 30,000 people crowded the streets on foot and in their cars to hand in their applications for a voucher for free Section 8 housing to the East Point Housing Authority. More than a thousand people [as I mentioned, it was actually 30,000 in the ...
What the government tells you to eat may be killing you
Tuesday, August 10th, 2010I really liked this post by Radley Balko. Nothing needs to be added to it: Over at City Journal, Steven Malanga looks at the recent history of federal dietary guidelines and finds they may well be killing us. As a recent review of the latest research in Scientific American pointed out, ever ...
H.R. 5741: Universal National Service Act
Friday, August 6th, 2010Perhaps you have seen the text of this House bill introduced by Chuck Rangel: the Universal National Service Act. Yes, a draft: military (or some other form of) slavery. Here is the summary sentence of the bill: To require all persons in the United States between the ages of 18 and ...
Driver error, not Toyota defects
Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010To the surprise of absolutely no one who was paying attention, the data recorders in the Toyota vehicles that supposedly accelerated out of control indicate that the drivers were responsible, not the accelerators, brake pedals, or electronics. I remember the Regular Guys radio show in Atlanta predicting, when these faulty ...
Competing currencies being accepted across mid-Michigan
Sunday, July 18th, 2010This story about many people and businesses in Michigan exchanging alternative forms of currency instead of U.S. dollars was pretty interesting. It's from a local news station, so it includes a video of the evening news segment, in addition to some excerpts from the news segment: Right now, you can buy ...
Obama regime’s refusal of Dutch help for the BP oil spill
Thursday, July 1st, 2010I might be a little late posting about this, but it doesn't make it any less infuriating: Three days after the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico began on April 20, the Netherlands offered the U.S. government ships equipped to handle a major spill, one much larger than the ...
Anthony de Jasay: socialism has made the European worker impotent
Sunday, June 27th, 2010Somehow I came across this article written by Anthony de Jasay for the Library of Economics and Liberty, which I know best as the site that publishes EconLog, the blag of Bryan Caplan, Arnold Kling, and David Henderson. Jasay's article was written in 2006. It details some consequences of socialist ...
The Great Material Continuum
Monday, June 7th, 2010Star Trek presented a notoriously bad conception of economics because of creator Gene Roddenberry's insistence that humans and all other races belonging to the United Federation of Planets would use no money. Science-fiction author Gardner Goldsmith explained why this economic ideal was not only fantasy but would result in material ...
Link of the day
Monday, May 24th, 2010Charles Johnson details how clean-water regulations actively prevent citizens and organizations from cleaning up water on their own. An important component of libertarian theory is that the State stifles private, community-based, voluntary efforts to keep the environment clean and encourages/allows companies to simply follow the letter of the law instead ...
Fish in a barrel 7
Monday, May 24th, 2010I've been a little depressed about how little time I have/make for blagging and reading about politics and economics this year, but it's because I'm working a lot, exercising five or six times a week, and watching things obsessively on DVD, like Star Trek and Futurama and True Blood. I ...
Misguided Tea Partiers, misguided Tea Party haters
Monday, April 26th, 2010You know, I actually think it's a shame the Tea Party gatherings receive nothing but ridicule and not discussion or engagement from the liberal Democrats. Really, what's more of a shame is that they deserve a lot of the ridicule, from libertarians and libertarian-ish people, because the movement has become ...
Comedian Larry Miller on politicians
Saturday, April 3rd, 2010Larry Miller, of Ten Things I Hate About You and general stand-up comedy fame, was interviewed on the Regular Guys show, the Atlanta morning radio show that I used to listen to in college and still listen to online regularly. Among other things, they got to talking about government and ...
My jury duty experience
Sunday, March 21st, 2010I'd like to relate my limited experience as a potential juror and use this as a starting point for some thoughts about our criminal justice system. It might be a little anti-climactic, but it might also be worth the read. I'll leave out a lot of specifics because it is ...
Alicia Keys: “I am an anarchist”
Saturday, February 27th, 2010Alicia Keys classifies herself as an anarchist. I'm not sure I agree with her conspiracy-like theories and certainly not her donation to the Democratic Party, but for someone famous and unexpected to call herself an anarchist and appear to actually know what it means is pretty cool. Maybe she's considered ...
Let the Canadian women celebrate how they want!
Saturday, February 27th, 2010Rarely have I been so pissed off in recent memory as I was at the outcries that the idiotic Olympic committee and the "international community" gave to the Canadian women's hockey team for its celebration following its gold medal victory, but what nearly made me yell at my TV was ...
Health care is not a right
Friday, February 26th, 2010Health care is not a right. No one has a right to health care. This has been said before and explained in better, more detailed terms than I'm going to here, but it bears repeating and needs explaining plainly and frequently. As difficult as it is to define abstract ideas ...
Quote of the day
Friday, February 19th, 2010All government is, after all, nothing more than an absurdity, a usurpation, and a crime, inflicted on the vast majority of peaceful people, without their consent, by the dictation of a select few men who have neither the wisdom, nor the virtue, nor the right to presume to rule over ...
Stupid census commercial
Thursday, February 18th, 2010Have you heard that radio commercial encouraging people to participate in and cooperate with the census because it allows local, state, and federal governments to allocate money for schools and determine how many teachers a town needs and so forth? The narrator says there are four science teachers in this ...
Economics link of the day
Thursday, February 11th, 2010I really liked this article that I found from Reddit: Economics In Four Dimensions. Here are two good passages to entice you: The most complex factor in the study of economics is time. Because liberal and statist economic theory does not properly account for the fourth dimension, it rarely predicts economic ...
Internet uprising overturns Australian censorship law
Friday, February 5th, 2010I don't think this news story got enough attention: from Ars Technica I read that an internet uprising led to the overturning of a very Orwellian censorship law in Australia. The law, which had taken effect just weeks prior, banned anonymous political commenting online. Can you imagine the twisted set ...
Campaign finance reform is pretty simple
Monday, January 25th, 2010Many of my friends and millions of people in the blogosphere/social-mediasphere have expressed their outrage and indignation at the Supreme Court's ruling that corporations can spend as much as they want to promote or oppose whatever political candidates or causes that they want. One of my friends said she was ...
One year of Obama crimes and failures
Tuesday, January 19th, 2010Barack Obama is already a terrible president, a war criminal who belongs in prison beside Dick Cheney and George W. Bush. He is an economic ignoramus who despises private enterprise, exalts the State over the individual, and dreams of a world in which the inert, gray, bureaucratic mediocrity of corporate-State ...
David Henderson: in defense of Avatar
Tuesday, January 12th, 2010If you haven't seen Avatar yet, you should; the plot might be incredibly predictable and, actually, almost identical to that of Poul Anderson's novella Call Me Joe or Robert F. Young's novella To Fell a Tree, but what you get out of it is the best visual, graphical, cinematic experience ...
Fish in a barrel 6
Thursday, December 17th, 2009For some combination of reasons, the main one probably being the coming of the Second Great Depression and the need of so many people to save money, the exorbitant price of a college degree is being criticized and questioned more loudly and frequently than I can remember. For instance, Peter ...
Obama-bashing quote of the day
Wednesday, December 16th, 2009In reality, the quote of the day is Chris Floyd's entire post about Tony Blair's warmongering glorification of the Iraq War and Obama's warmongering glorification of any war the Imperial Federal Government embarks on—in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, no less! But since I know you all read Chris Floyd's ...
Monopolistic law-enforcement systems are a racket
Wednesday, December 16th, 2009My friend got a new car, a white Subaru Legacy, to replace his old white Subaru Legacy. Apparently, Michigan law lets you transfer your old license plates to your new car in some (all?) situations, so he just took his license plate off of his old Legacy and put it ...
The auto bailout money will not be repaid
Tuesday, December 15th, 2009And there will be more of it. Probably multiple times. Until the automotive industry is a de facto arm of the Imperial Federal Government. If you think this is not an explicit goal of the Obama regime, leave your address in the comments so I can mail you a tall, ...
Robert Fisk: Obama is a disaster
Tuesday, December 15th, 2009British Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk says Obama's foreign policy is a disaster potentially worse than Bush's, and that it is incomprehensible why Obama has taken on the Afghan war with such enthusiasm. I think it's safe to say that the libertarian community in general predicted his continuation of neoconservative, ...
Amanda Knox: guilty…or is she?
Monday, December 7th, 2009I was very intrigued by this short video featuring an Italian lawyer, who has practiced in the U.S. and in Italy, explaining the differences between criminal trials (specifically, the judges and juries) in the two countries. He was being interviewed in the context of the conviction of Amanda Knox, the ...
Get it straight: the military does not protect our lives or our freedoms
Wednesday, November 11th, 2009War is the health of the State.—Randolph Bourne Today is Veterans' Day, formerly called Armistice Day. But, our exalted warmongering Statolatrist congressmen and senators and presidents couldn't have a holiday that celebrated the end of a colossal State endeavor, so in 1954 they renamed it Veterans' Day. The attention paid to ...
Because in a free society, people would attack each other without provocation or fear of punishment from a higher legal authority
Wednesday, November 4th, 2009A man returns home from drinking one night to find part of his house on fire. He warns everyone, wakes them up, helps them outside, then goes back inside to rescue someone who, he had just learned, was asleep upstairs. Do the police officers at the end of the driveway ...
IP absurdities, part 23,984
Friday, October 30th, 2009"I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it." —Voltaire Apparently hosting a Harry Potter–themed dinner party for charity around Halloween is an infringement of Warner Bros.'s copyrights.
Comic of the day
Friday, October 30th, 2009This is three years old, but it is today's comic in my Dilbert page-a-day calendar. It's so appropriate for the real world of internet debating in general and political debates in particular.
Fish in a barrel 5
Wednesday, October 21st, 2009A Texas jury decided to sentence a murderer to death after consulting their Bibles during deliberation. People who lack a solid grasp of important socio-political issues (Statists) will use this revelation to distract from the real issue. The issue they will harp on is whether this represents some violation of ...