Archive for the ‘Rants’ Category
Alicia Keys: “I am an anarchist”
Saturday, February 27th, 2010Alicia Keys classifies herself as an anarchist. I'm not sure I agree with her conspiracy-like theories and certainly not her donation to the Democratic Party, but for someone famous and unexpected to call herself an anarchist and appear to actually know what it means is pretty cool. Maybe she's considered ...
Let the Canadian women celebrate how they want!
Saturday, February 27th, 2010Rarely have I been so pissed off in recent memory as I was at the outcries that the idiotic Olympic committee and the "international community" gave to the Canadian women's hockey team for its celebration following its gold medal victory, but what nearly made me yell at my TV was ...
Monopolistic law-enforcement systems are a racket
Wednesday, December 16th, 2009My friend got a new car, a white Subaru Legacy, to replace his old white Subaru Legacy. Apparently, Michigan law lets you transfer your old license plates to your new car in some (all?) situations, so he just took his license plate off of his old Legacy and put it ...
Fish in a barrel 4
Wednesday, October 14th, 2009Yeah, I'm not too worried about those Scandinavian socialist utopias leaving the United States in the dust in terms of wealth, technology, and quality of life any time soon. Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner says Americans are just going to have to get used to saving more of their money. ...
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, ...
Quote of the day
Thursday, September 17th, 2009"If the achievement of a free society is to require that a million bleeding heads of torturing tyrants, damnable dictators, pandering politicians, sadistic generals, privileged policemen, criminal soldiers and psychotic, irresponsible “servants” be hoisted on pikes to surround the palisades of the free cities, count me in for the headsman’s ...
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 ...
Weekend links
Saturday, June 20th, 2009Not much time to blag; here are my favorite readings from the last couple weeks (apologies for not including something good that you wrote; I don't have much time for reading, either). Will the American auto industry fail? at No Third Solution. How zoning rules would work in a free society by ...
Fish in a barrel
Friday, June 19th, 2009Here are a few issues or news stories that I've come across recently that I could offer easy and obvious solutions or objections to, or that libertarianism has already provided an easy and obvious answer to: Philip Morris supports new FDA regulations on cigarettes. Why, when they've opposed previous interventions in ...
Accidental SEO
Tuesday, April 7th, 2009Uh, somehow my post of the Debt Star picture that I yoinked from David Z. is the number-1 Google search result for "debt star". Somehow it isn't anywhere near the first Google image search result, though... No wonder that post has been getting so many hits lately. This website really ...
How are Mondragón co-ops handling the recession?
Sunday, March 29th, 2009An interesting and far too short article in The Economist. Hat tip: David Z.
John’s thought of the day
Tuesday, March 17th, 2009Maybe if Americans weren't so stupid and/or willfully ignorant of important political and economic issues, they wouldn't be as outraged at AIG executive bonuses as they were at the government taking all that money from people who earned it and giving it to people who didn't in the first place.
Buy gold!
Wednesday, March 4th, 2009I bought $505 worth of gold yesterday at a local coin and antiques shop. It was almost half an ounce contained in three old British and Swiss coins. That wasn't quite the optimal gold-coin purchase I had in mind when I looked up local coin shops, but I guess gold ...
Market anarchist blag carnival, last edition
Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009I am still really bummed out that February's edition of the market anarchist blag carnival will probably be the last. It is being discontinued due to lack of interest. I can tell from my very passive browsing of other people's blagrolls, from seeing all the people who post at this ...
Tell me if I am being sexist, realistic, naive, all of the above…
Tuesday, February 24th, 2009I'll get right to the point: When I hear about a rape case or a rape accusation, my default reaction is to side with the accused man or boy until I hear compelling evidence of his guilt. My default reaction probably should be to side with no one and have ...
24: Torture is A-ok
Monday, January 12th, 2009A number of my friends have Facebook statuses (stati?) about the new season of 24. Apparently, they're doing a two night double header, in which they showed one episode last night to be followed by an additional one tonight. I feel compelled to comment on my thoughts of 24. I saw ...
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 ...
Lew copies John
Monday, December 15th, 2008In his recent column against the imminent automaker bailout, Lew Rockwell raised an objection that I raised a month ago. Lew wrote: What Americans have chosen not to buy, the government is now effectively forcing them to buy. You want a Toyota and paid for it with your money but your ...
Bernard Madoff arrested for running Ponzi scheme
Friday, December 12th, 2008Apparently the irony is completely lost on the professional criminals in the FBI and SEC. According to a Bloomberg article, Bernard Madoff, founder and president of a New York firm that invested funds for wealthy individuals, hedge funds and other institutions, was charged with operating what he told employees was a long-running ...
Stabenow and Gettelfinger plead for bailout
Friday, December 5th, 2008On the radio this morning I heard a clip of Michigan Senator Debbie Stabenow, presumably in Washington, talking about the desperate need for a bailout of the automotive industry. I can't find an article or video with her dialogue, but this is very close to an exact quote from Stabenow's ...
November market anarchist blag carnival
Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008I enjoyed each of the posts submitted to the November edition of the market anarchist blag carnival. I tried to submit my post on early English law, but my internet was down for a couple days, and then I forgot, and then I was incommunicado down in the land of ...
Time To Bail On The Dollar
Wednesday, November 26th, 2008With the bailouts that have been going on over the past week, with Dictator Paulson pledging half of our national productivity to bail out failing financials, I think it's clear time to get out of the dollar. About two months ago, I had devised a plan. To buttress myself against ...
Quick thought on an auto bailout
Friday, November 14th, 2008Another inflation-powered bailout of nearly an entire industry, this time U.S. automakers, is imminent. It is practically a certainty by this point. I'm not sure whether the Bush or Obama administrations will do it, but it doesn't matter. How is a $50 billion bailout of these behemoth failures different from taking ...
Quote of the day
Sunday, November 9th, 2008"I was not meant for the job or the spotlight of public life in Washington. Here ruining people is considered sport." —Vince Foster
Zogby survey answers
Wednesday, November 5th, 2008I receive Zogby surveys in my Hotmail inbox occasionally, and I participate in about half of them. I did one today, which was mostly but not entirely about yesterday's advance auction in stolen goods. I was particularly intrigued by three questions in it, which asked me to type in my ...
Undecided voters are the biggest idiots on the planet
Monday, November 3rd, 2008In Michigan and probably some other states, there has been some moderate amount of discussion, amongst state legislators and radio hosts and other worthless people, about whether voters should be allowed to wear political shirts to their polling places on election day. Since campaign advertisements such as signs and flyers ...
Quote of the day
Tuesday, October 28th, 2008"I wonder if Stevens has ever cared the tiniest bit about the way that Justice Department lawyers treat people until now. Now that he's the victim, suddenly he fancies himself some kind of underdog hero." —Ryan McMaken, on Sen. Ted Stevens blaming his conviction on an "unconscionable" Department of Justice [sic]
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 ...
A Question
Tuesday, October 14th, 2008For many of our readers here, it may be surprising to find that I am a veteran. It's not really something I bring up often, and typically when others do, I try to change the subject. I do have a post planned for the near future that addresses some of ...
Meet CutoutDissection.com
Tuesday, October 14th, 2008Which once again proves my theory that teenagers are idiots.
Quote of the day
Saturday, October 4th, 2008“The Soviet economy is proof that...a socialist command economy can function and even thrive.” —Nobel Prize winner Paul A. Samuelson, 1989 Hat tip: Robert Higgs, in an excellent rant about the impracticality of every government-created economic program, such as the recently-collapsed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Austrian business cycle theory and recent irrationality
Saturday, October 4th, 2008I am not even an amateur economist yet, much less a real economist, but I think I understand the basics of the Austrian business cycle theory (ABCT). As you know, I think it explains the boom–bust cycle of our economies pretty well (but maybe that's because the libertarian economists I ...
Blagnet.net survey
Thursday, October 2nd, 2008Blagnet.net's survey of the day: What did you do instead of watching the debate between two professional-criminal VP candidates? I debated with Francois over the morality and voluntariness of hierarchies and attempted to learn about banking and finance from FSK.
Democratic voters are stupid, evil, or ignorant
Sunday, September 28th, 2008Being a big-shot blagger is a stressful and demanding hobby. Similar to the evolution of rules, bylaws, punishments, and social mores in a customary-law society, our positions, assertions, and predictions are under constant judgment and scrutiny by the global community of readers and other blaggers, leading to the success of ...
Interest rates in market anarchism
Sunday, September 28th, 2008I was quite fascinated by this post by Corktageous. It contains some good rebuttals of the anarcho-socialist/mutualist philosophies. You can read it and make of it what you will, but my purpose in this post is to ponder a little bit about interest rates, a topic that was brought up ...
The bailout is even worse than we know
Saturday, September 27th, 2008I liked two rants that I found via this Chris Floyd post. The first is by Arthur Silber, whom Floyd is fond of quoting, and with good reason: ...the consequences we are now seeing are irrevocable and unavoidable. The bad debts must be accounted for and written off. A problem of ...
“Libertarian paternalism” is idiotic
Tuesday, September 16th, 2008This concept of "libertarian paternalism" is possibly the stupidest thing I've heard since some self-described libertarians suggested that Rudy Giuliani had a libertarian molecule in his body. It is so stupid because it is a metaphysical impossibility. Tim Harford of the Financial Times seems to be largely amenable to the ...
Welcome Red and Black Readers!
Friday, September 12th, 2008Welcome esteemed readers of the Red and Black. Undoubtedly, some of you may have stumbled here from an article that was published today in the school paper. If you're interested - though the school actually almost produced my article word for word, for which I thank them - you can ...
It’s published
Friday, September 12th, 2008My last entry was published. You can see the entry here. It's only 9:44 in the morning, and I've already been told I'm an idiot.
Women, children, and old people
Thursday, September 4th, 2008Ryan McMaken makes some good points about the politicization of the Olympics, not that anyone cares now that college football season is here, but he makes some awfully stupid statements along the way. Comparing the bad human-rights record of this year's host nation, China, to past instances of murderous governments ...
Staggering ignorance 2
Wednesday, August 13th, 2008Unfortunately, the greater the humanitarian outreach, the greater the violence required to achieve it.—Ron PaulAt lunch today I overheard people talking about the ridiculous sums of wealth that athletes and entertainers accumulate, and they wondered what in the world those hundred-millionaires and billionaires do with all that money, and why ...
Huzzah for the SCOTUS
Thursday, June 26th, 2008If I'm to understand http://www.scotusblog.com/wp/ correctly, it would seem that the Supreme Court just recently released their ruling on Heller vs. The District of Columbia which has decided that the second amendment protects an individuals right to bear arms. This is outstanding news. Therefore, I hereby declare today Second Amendment ...
The Drug War
Thursday, June 19th, 2008I realize that it's bad form for me - the one author of this website that hardly ever authors - to have my most recent article in several weeks be nothing more than a simple drive by linking, but you know what? I do what I want! Here, John Stossel makes ...
What if climate-change alarmists are right?
Friday, May 23rd, 2008Max Borders presents a pretty good case as to why State solutions to those problems are worse than the problems themselves.
THAT is real journalism!
Saturday, May 17th, 2008Keith Olbermann gets a bad rap from libertarians because of his left-liberal socialism and the rarity of a dissenting commentator ever appearing as a guest on his show. Not having watched or heard much from him, I can't back up the latter accusation, but I've watched enough to know the ...
Happy Mother’s Day
Sunday, May 11th, 2008It was considered a pretty stupid idea back when it was introduced as a potential official holiday in the Senate.
Market anarchist blag carnival
Thursday, May 1st, 2008See the 14th monthly market anarchist blag carnival, at Radical Libertarian. I submitted my post about the abolition of government schools, from early in the month. There's lots of other good entries, but I haven't come close to getting through all of them. Thanks to Francois Tremblay for introducing me to ...
I hate hippies!
Saturday, April 19th, 2008On Chris Lander's web page Stuff White People Like, there are primarily two types of blag posts: entries into the ever-growing list of stuff white people like, and news items that exemplify white people liking those things. So far, the most famous and well-liked entry in the list of stuff ...
Obama’s wrong and so are (some of) his critics
Sunday, April 13th, 2008Barack Obama created a little stir with two of his speeches recently, at least among those of us who still haven't been bewitched by his ostentatious oratory. First, in San Francisco, he said, "So it's not surprising then that [when voters] get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or ...
Vox Day writes something interesting
Saturday, April 12th, 2008In a rare departure from his self-glorifying discussions of his latest book and egotistical condescension towards atheists, scientists, feminists, and all non-Christian non-Creationists, Vox Day talks about politics and makes it funny at the same time: "You've got to put the video game away once in a while." - Barack Obama You know, ...