Archive for the ‘Property rights’ Category
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 ...
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 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, ...
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.
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 ...
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 ...
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!
Customary law must be widely accepted and evolves for the better
Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008After my long essay about customary "law" and the market of preferences, decency, and reputations in internet content providers, Tim Swanson posted a comment recommending The Enterprise of Law by the economist Bruce L. Benson. This book is about customary vs. governmental law and the market for law-enforcement services in ...
Rights don’t need limiting by the State
Friday, July 25th, 2008For the life of me I can't find the blag post where I read this, but I'm pretty sure it was a post that Bob Murphy at Crash Landing linked to. Anyway, it was some Statist economics blag, and a commenter gave what he thought was a perfect example of ...
What libertarianism isn’t
Monday, July 21st, 2008David Z. at ...No Third Solution wrote a post that I really liked called The truth about what anarchists want. In response to some immature, lazy, and ignorant blaggers who really don't know what libertarianism is, or at least don't know what libertarians envision that libertarianism is ("They want to ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...