Archive for the ‘Property rights’ 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 ...
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 ...