Archive for the ‘Philosophy’ Category
African nature preserves and the tragedy of the commons
Tuesday, July 8th, 2008In the July 4, 2008 issue of Science, there was a news & views article about over-hunting and poaching of animals on nature preserves in Africa, due to the large increase in human populations surrounding the preserves. It seems the establishment of nature preserves attracts people to settle around them, ...
Kill switches and remote control
Friday, July 4th, 2008Bruce Schneier, the computer-security guru whom Brad at WendyMcElroy.com often links to, wrote a pretty chilling post on kill switches and remote control. This type of technology is an example of why government is not your only enemy, but its creation of the national-security state enables private companies and individuals ...
Brave Statists on Mises.org
Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008As wrong as they are, I am quite impressed with several of the non-libertarians—and in fact outright socialists—who frequent the Mises blag discussion threads and offer their input as to why a Mises columnist or blagger was way off and why government is actually not so bad, and is necessary, ...
It must suck to be Matt Moore
Saturday, June 21st, 2008I know this is nearly one-month-old news, but I have been too busy to blag much lately, as you can tell. Fear not, I'll be back in full force soon. I have been meaning to blag about this for a while because it is so stupid and so maddening. Radley ...
Why I oppose monopolistic justice (sic) systems
Thursday, June 5th, 2008The only remaining halfway-decent argument against the unregulated free market that I've encountered is that private police, courts, and retribution systems would be unaccountable to the actual justice of natural law and result in an increase in unchecked use of force against innocents. This would happen, they say, because there ...
Francois Tremblay: Agorism, not political action
Wednesday, June 4th, 2008Francois Tremblay wrote an excellent open letter to all Libertarians, and that's with a capital L, meaning the ones who think of themselves as members of the Libertarian Party and act mainly to promote LP candidates. Typically capital-L Libertarians are minarchists who believe in the Constitution or some such. This ...
15th monthly market anarchist blag carnival
Sunday, June 1st, 2008The 15th monthly market anarchist blag carnival is up at Hellbound Alleee. I had never been to that site before, nor to several of the websites that had entries this month. Pretty sweet. I submitted my brief insights on California's gay-marriage decision and the relationship between marriage the State in ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
Can anarchism save Somalia?
Sunday, April 27th, 2008"Good government" is a paradox. Any people so decent as to be capable of implementing it would be better off without it, and any people so rotten as to need it would be incapable of implementing it. —unknown Somalia's condition, its history, and the attempts by the U.N. and U.S. to impose ...
Democracy disgraced
Friday, April 25th, 2008After the debate in Philadelphia between Obama and Hillary, ABC moderators George Stephanopoulos and Charlie Gibson were widely and harshly criticized for the way they ran the debate; specifically, the questions they spent the first 45 minutes on. Viewers, writers, and Obama's camp complained that voters did not hear anything ...
On escaping from cults
Monday, April 21st, 2008I guess I'm just a total and complete liar. This is my fourth consecutive post relating to the raid and kidnapping at the Fundamentalist Latter-Day Saints ranch in Eldorado, Texas. I seriously, honestly did not expect to make more than one post in the near future about the events, and ...
The capitalist reformer of Estonia
Saturday, April 19th, 2008Mart Laar, prime minister of the former Soviet republic of Estonia from 1992 to 1994 and from 1999 to 2002, won the 2006 Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty from the Cato Institute. The Cato Institute's description of him says, Laar realized that the only way for Estonia to weather ...
Emma Goldman
Saturday, April 19th, 2008The subject of today's featured article on the home page of Wikipedia.
Statism is Utopian
Monday, April 7th, 2008Francois Tremblay wrote a little essay titled Statism is Utopian, explaining why it is incorrect to label anarcho-capitalism as Utopian and why Statism is the societal system that is least likely to generate a good outcome for most people—certainly the system least likely to be remotely just or moral (which ...
Smoking ban prediction
Monday, March 10th, 2008As far as I am aware, the only friend or semi-close acquaintance of mine who opposes bans on smoking in "public" (i.e., private) businesses is Kelly. I wouldn't be surprised if some of my family did, because they are pretty libertarian, but it's never come up. Then there's the college ...
Rights don’t come from the Constitution
Sunday, March 9th, 2008Facebook's US politics question for today was: "Does the Second Amendment give individual citizens the right to own guns?" Um, the Constitution doesn't GIVE anybody any rights to anything, you fucking retards. And even if that were the stated purpose of a Constitution, the fact that it claims to give someone ...
Plato’s Allegory of the Cave
Thursday, February 28th, 2008If you took a college philosophy course, perhaps you learned about Plato's Allegory of the Cave, which is one of the most fascinating and memorable images in literary history, especially in the history of philosophy. It is from chapter seven of The Republic. I was prompted to find this tale ...
Kosovo’s secession
Tuesday, February 26th, 2008On the morning of February 18, the day after the region of Kosovo announced its secession and independence from Serbia, someone at work had the radio on NPR, which was mainly broadcasting the BBC's coverage of the Kosovo secession. Most of the coverage, especially the comments they played from citizens ...
Fatal asthma attacks and smoking bans
Monday, February 25th, 2008Recently I blagged about a poor girl who suffered a fatal asthma attack induced by the cigarette smoke at the restaurant she worked at, and that this would surely lead to a state-wide smoking ban in "public" (i.e., private) businesses. While I haven't heard any news about such fascist legislation ...
Legal or moral?
Monday, February 18th, 2008My Mises Institute copy of The Law arrived today, and I couldn't help but start reading it. It is my favorite political writing of all time, minarchist though it is. (If Bastiat had lived another decade or two instead of being taken at the age of 49 by tuberculosis, he ...
The production of security
Sunday, February 17th, 2008Gustave de Molinari, the original anarcho-capitalist, on monopolistic vs. free provision of security services. Hat tip: Jeffrey Tucker of the Mises blag.
My anarchist conversion
Tuesday, February 12th, 2008Encountering some other anarcho-capitalists' web pages recently, like Roderick Long and Charles Johnson, got me to reminiscing about the single, specific thing that made me convert from Frederic Bastiat's minarchism to Rothbardian anarcho-capitalism. I don't know how many libertarians can identify a single experience or essay or moment that led ...
Smoking bans
Sunday, February 10th, 2008Well, I guess Michigan will be getting a statewide ban on smoking in public (i.e., private) establishments soon. Sad, both for the woman who died from a smoke-induced asthma attack and for the state of our civilization that we cry for government coercion to solve every problem people face. This ...
It IS happening here
Friday, February 1st, 2008Republocrats currently use fear-mongering on two big issues to garner support for their various State interventions into our lives—terrorism for some, global warming for others. Perhaps it can be said that libertarians also use something akin to fear-mongering in our debate and discussion, though of course I think it is ...
Vox Day on non-aggression and religion
Saturday, January 26th, 2008Vox Day found a blag post about him that was quite funny. It is from a German guy who calls himself atheist and libertarian (I don't know if he would fit my and Kelly's rather narrow definition of libertarian) who wrote: This morning, I stumbled upon a very popular blog (judging ...
The philosophy of Firefly
Monday, January 21st, 2008The State Theatre in Ann Arbor did a midnight showing of Serenity on Saturday night, so, naturally, I was extremely excited about it and was looking forward to it for two weeks. I went with my girlfriend and several other friends, most of whom are huge Firefly fans. I pick ...
Minarchism: Ethically self-contradictory
Saturday, January 19th, 2008A really good essay at the blag Brainpolice, a member of the Mises Institute's Austrian Network.
Tim Swanson on the harm of State regulation of telecom
Thursday, December 27th, 2007Tim Swanson has written a collection of masterful columns for the Mises Institute, one in 2006 and two in the past week, about the harm already done to consumers by State intervention in the telecommunications industry and the harm that more State intervention will cause. I will try to amalgamate and ...
Gene Callahan on Rousseau
Wednesday, December 26th, 2007Gene Callahan, Austrian economist, LRC contributor, and author of Economics for Real People, runs a blag called Crash Landing. He wrote a good post about the first part of The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, defending Rousseau as being a very intelligent, sharp, and skilled political philosopher, and for having ...
Minarchism, libertarianism, and negative rights
Sunday, December 23rd, 2007Jeffrey Tucker's recent account of his experience in court spawned a quite lively discussion in the Mises blag about private provision of law enforcement in the absence of a State. I made one of the comments towards the end. Many of the minarchist positions and objections are good and well ...
Origins
Sunday, December 23rd, 2007Though this website is only at the beginning of its infancy, it is already clear that the partnership of John and Kelly at blagnet.net is destined to be remembered alongside Rothbard and Mises, Jefferson and Madison, Caesar and Octavian, Roosevelt and Churchill, Watson and Crick, Lennon and McCartney, Shakespeare and ...
Defining Libertarianism
Friday, December 21st, 2007Welcome to Blagnet.net. It is our intention here to have a forum for the discussion of libertarian philosophy and how it applies to modern American politics. However, before we begin to do so, it is important, dear reader, for us to first clearly define what we mean when we say "libertarian". ...