Archive for the ‘Divisiveness’ Category
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
Fish in a barrel 3
Wednesday, September 30th, 2009Nate Anderson of Ars Technica wrote, Licensed spectrum came into being for a reason. In the early days of radio, unlicensed radio stations in urban areas regularly got into "power wars" with rival stations, leading to plenty of static. Compared to this free-for-all, the licensing of radio stations in the US, ...
Fish in a barrel 2
Thursday, September 17th, 2009California tax officials: legal pot would bring $1.4B. No, you still don't quite seem to get it. If it is TAXED and REGULATED, both of which are restrictions or extortions backed with explicit threats of murder, then by definition it is NOT LEGAL. You mean, "Legal except only in the ...
Misconceptions about libertarianism and Statism
Tuesday, September 1st, 2009I find that correcting misconceptions about libertarianism amounts more to correcting misconceptions about the State than anything else. Statists don't understand libertarianism because they don't understand their own philosophy. Libertarianism is individual liberty, personal sovereignty, voluntary association, and moral egalitarianism for all people. By "moral egalitarianism" I mean everyone is ...
Obama stimulus plan fomenting trade war
Sunday, May 24th, 2009The Obama regime's short-sighted but typical "buy American" stimulus policies are beginning to foment a trade war between the United States and other countries. Ordered by Congress to "buy American" when spending money from the $787 billion stimulus package, the town of Peru, Ind., stunned its Canadian supplier by rejecting ...
Inequality is fatal?
Thursday, May 14th, 2009In the April 30 issue of Nature, the new book The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett is reviewed. Some excerpts from the review: Why are our chances of reaching a great age so affected by wealth and status? The obvious ...
Facebook “thoughts” of the day
Saturday, April 4th, 2009A friend's Facebook status: "...says its about time the government passes some serious gun control laws. to hell with the right to bear arms." Her friends' responses: "hear hear!" "No guns and arms? That settles it, no more gym." (admittedly, kind of funny) "But then what the hell am I going ...
Taxes shouldn’t pay for stem cell research
Saturday, March 7th, 2009To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical. —Thomas Jefferson Because they shouldn't pay for anything. Associated Press reports: Eight years of frustration are close to an end for scientists seeking ways to use embryonic stem cells to combat illness and ...
Zoning laws are the worse of two (or more) evils
Wednesday, February 25th, 2009I liked Charles Johnson's letter to the editor of the Las Vegas Sun, criticizing the Clark County government for forcing a local church to stop building, or reduce in size, three large crosses it was planning to erect on its property. The bellowing blowhard busybody brigade complains these crosses — built ...
Politics breeds hypocrisy. Who knew?
Wednesday, February 18th, 2009Michiganders must be some of the biggest hypocrites in the American political scene today. All I heard on the radio for the entire fall was how the country needed the auto industry to be bailed out at almost any cost, it was the lifeblood of the middle class, a fundamental ...
Early English law screwed the masses to benefit the aristocracy
Thursday, November 13th, 2008In my ongoing and very occasional progression through Bruce Benson's masterpiece The Enterprise of Law, I am learning more and more about the origins of authoritarian (State-originated and -enforced) law and its usurpation of customary (community-originated and reciprocal-incentive-enforced) law in Medieval England. The main thrust of chapter 3 is that ...
Race and Obama’s non-achievement
Friday, November 7th, 2008Compare semi-libertarian Radley Balko's commentary on President-elect Obama's achievement: Tonight, we took a huge step toward putting race behind us. It’s something to be proud of. to real libertarian Lew Rockwell's assessment of the perception that Obama (and his voters) achieved something monumental: The main message concerns race. All the headlines blared ...
Rooting for Barack Obama
Tuesday, November 4th, 2008All of my friends and colleagues, being scientific researchers who are funded by the State (National Institutes of Health, mainly), want Obama to win so badly they can taste it. They preach about doing your civic duty of voting every chance they get, and they talk and email about how ...
Michigan ballot proposals
Tuesday, November 4th, 2008I broke down and went to my polling location this morning to vote for one ballot proposal and vote against four of them, and write in "NOBODY" for president, Senate, House of Representatives, state legislature positions, mayor, etc. The ballot proposal I voted Yes on was to legalize medical marijuana ...
Authoritarian law engenders conflict, discourages voluntary interaction
Friday, September 19th, 2008From chapter 3 of Bruce Benson's The Enterprise of Law, "The Rise of Authoritarian Law": When government becomes involved in the enterprise of law, both the rules of conduct and the institutions for enforcement are likely to change. The primary functions of governments are to act as a mechanism to take ...
Children, forward to the Glorious Green Future!
Saturday, August 16th, 2008Unsurprisingly, quite a few radical environmentalists are escalating their alarmist/propagandist efforts and trying to turn children into snitches on their parents and blind servants of the Glorious State. I'm pretty sure most people who call themselves "environmentalists" and embrace the term would find this brand of brainwashing and family-destruction very ...
Wendy McElroy: the State discourages helpfulness and decency
Sunday, June 8th, 2008Many libertarians have come to consider the police and other law-enforcement divisions of the State as the most directly vicious and physically dangerous branches of the State to deal with. Wendy McElroy wrote about why you should never voluntarily talk to agents of the State or offer them any unnecessary ...
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 ...
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 ...