Archive for the ‘Philosophy’ Category
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. ...
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. ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
Quote of the day
Sunday, October 18th, 2009"Government has never increased the standard of living of one single human being in civilization's history." —Steve Wynn, Fox News Sunday, October 11, 2009
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, ...
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 ...
Pirates: orderly anarchists
Saturday, July 11th, 2009Libertarian psychologist and Skepticblagger Michael Shermer has an interesting review of Peter Leeson's new book, The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates, in the July 9, 2009 issue of Nature. While neither Shermer, nor Leeson, nor I would defend pirate societies as the pinnacle of liberty and cultural progress, ...
Quote of the day
Sunday, July 5th, 2009"Minarchy is the theory that free market capitalism is best protected by a socialist monopoly." —Less Antman, in response to Sheldon Richman's post
Conservatism is fatally flawed
Sunday, June 14th, 2009Is capitalism fatally flawed? asks Paul McDonnold in the Christian Science Monitor. Recessions, like hurricanes, leave wreckage behind—bankrupt businesses, high unemployment, and sometimes even tattered philosophies. No, they don't. Inflationary booms leave bankrupt businesses and unemployment, not to mention devalued currency, behind. Recessions correct those mistakes. The only "tattered philosophy" I've ...
Quote of the day
Wednesday, June 10th, 2009From Roderick Long's chapter in Anarchism/Minarchism: The confused assumption that a legal framework must (or even can) be external to what it constrains tends to make political structure invisible except insofar as it is realised in familiar state-monopoly institutions. And this in turn helps to explain what anarchists often find puzzling: ...
Proposals for Baltimore’s vacant lots
Tuesday, May 26th, 2009Um, it's called squatting. Libertarianism took care of this issue more than a century ago.
Quote of the day
Wednesday, May 20th, 2009The law? Commander, laws change depending on who's making them. Cardassians one day, Federation the next. But justice is justice. —Odo, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, "A Man Alone"
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 ...
Political quizzes
Saturday, May 2nd, 2009I recently took this political-spectrum quiz that actually seemed somewhat worthwhile and substantive, unlike a few quizzes of the same type that I've taken before. The same site has several more political quizzes that I haven't taken and don't plan to, but some of them also looked like they had ...
Other people’s thoughts on chaos and anarchy
Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009Depends on what you mean by "chaos" and "anarchy"... There are two words that really separate us hard-core libertarians from small-government Republicans and civil-liberties-focused Democrats: Chaos and Anarchy. Libertarians love chaos and anarchy, while most Americans still cringe from these words. For most folks, chaos is some Road ...
On murder rates in Stateless societies
Tuesday, April 21st, 2009Professor Long is pretty much awesome. I would say that of all living political philosophers, his ideas and conclusions about liberty, government, economics, and society match my own (and, in fact, have helped me enunciate my own) more than any other. I don't consider myself very much of a cultural ...
Obamaism is Statism
Friday, April 10th, 2009Out of some strange curiosity I decided to peruse The New Yorker, probably because it is supposed to be a source of good artistic criticism, cultural-political commentary, and humor. One of the first things that caught my eye was "Obamaism" by George Packer. It is supposed to be a commentary ...
The eternal truth of market principles
Saturday, March 28th, 2009As I understand it, one of the great philosophical contributions that Ludwig von Mises made to the world was not simply to explain why governmental perturbation of market forces doesn't work, but to explain that it can't work—he explained how the things that the State can achieve are limited by ...
We need more competition, not consolidation, in food-inspection agencies
Thursday, February 26th, 2009My experience and my reading has convinced me that more freedom (less government) in a given industry or sector of the economy leads to more, cheaper, and better goods and services. Libertarians take this as a given. Despite the Statist objection to the possibility of competition between rival companies/agencies/organizations in ...
Water shortage does not equal water scarcity
Wednesday, February 25th, 2009I liked this column by Chris Brown for the Ludwig von Mises Institute because it echoed some points I made in two previous posts: Water shortages and water-trading between states and Scarcity is not shortage. Some excerpts (italics in original): The government has blamed the shortage of water on drought 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 ...
Space junk
Wednesday, February 25th, 2009Debris from satellites and other random pieces of space junk are crowding the lower levels of outer space, to the extent that satellites and the Hubble Space Telescope are at risk for colliding with some of it at any given time (supposedly). I can imagine this problem will only get ...
Quote and links of the day
Saturday, January 31st, 2009On the off-chance that you haven't read them, I thoroughly enjoyed this critique of Noam Chomsky and other communist idiots and the ensuing discussion of it at Austro-Athenian Empire. Roderick Long's involvement makes just about everything into a stimulating discussion, if it wasn't already. The quote of the day was provided ...
Freedom-hating “nudger” appointed to regulatory post
Thursday, January 8th, 2009Skip Oliva writes about the appointment of Harvard law school professor Cass R. Sunstein as administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. This is one of the most important "regulatory" (murder/slavery-mongering) bureaucracies in the federal government. There isn't much I could add to Oliva's post. Except to link ...
Libertarian girls
Sunday, January 4th, 2009I have been meaning to write about this for a while. A former student of Walter Block wrote to him: I read an Economist article yesterday praising the government for bailing out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and was shocked that such an august publication could be so short-sighted. I ...
Water shortages and water-trading between states
Saturday, December 27th, 2008My former state of residence, Georgia, is in a severe drought. It has been for years. It has gotten worse and worse over the last couple of years. Naturally, only government intervention in the water market can cause a true shortage. As far as I understand it, governments in the ...
The Kel Weaver Political Bit
Monday, December 8th, 2008My brother, whom I would describe as a Christian Fundamentalist Republican, once made a comment that I was "more right" than he was, simply because I wanted even less government than him. This seems odd to me, considering that I'm opposed to laws against gay marriage, drugs, or many other ...
What If…
Thursday, November 20th, 2008David Z over at No Third Solution has a series of posts in which he talks in great detail about taxes that show he is way more knowledgeable about economic issues than I am. They are quite long, and I will admit to not have read all of them completely yet ...
Minarchist states and basic necessities
Saturday, November 15th, 2008What are the most basic necessities of life, of survival? I'd say food, water, and shelter. In our modern world, a fourth good one to add to the list would be medicine. I think it's fair to say that without these four and certainly without the first three being available ...
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 ...
Sheldon Richman on tacit consent
Sunday, November 9th, 2008Sheldon Richman wrote a good post about social contracts and tacit consent, which are attempts at justifications for Statism that cannot stand up to even the most basic and off-the-cuff libertarian objections. ...this got me thinking about the curious principle of tacit consent. Here are the thoughts I jotted down today. ...
Educating for Anarchism, Blagnet.net edition
Friday, October 31st, 2008Mike over at nostate.com has an occasional post entitled Educating for Anarchism, in which he posts real life exchanges of his political beliefs with others. Below, you will find an exchange with my brother in a Facebook message thread (which sadly, is the best means he has of keeping in ...
Immorality and control
Friday, October 24th, 2008I liked this post by Francois Tremblay about hierarchies and control. One of the good things about being a libertarian blagger is that you can have intellectual debates with other amateur (or, sometimes, professional) philosophers about real, substantive issues. The bad side is that libertarians often disagree over semantics and ...
Ownership key to saving fisheries
Monday, September 22nd, 2008Writes Radley Balko: "The BBC somewhat surprisingly publishes the answer to the continuing tragedy of the commons that is the world’s fisheries: property rights!
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 ...