Archive for the ‘Unrealistic’ Category
The coming ban on semi-automatic rifles
Monday, December 17th, 2012I expect Congress and President Obama to pass some form of ban or stricter federal law against semi-automatic weapons and/or "assault rifles" in the next few months. I'm sure many Americans strongly support such a ban now, after the Sandy Hook Elementary School murders, if they didn't before. It's easy ...
Locavores want to have their cake and eat it, too
Thursday, February 24th, 2011I just typed that title and didn't realize until after typing it that it was quite a good pun. A perfect example of no pun intended! This post does have a point. I really liked this post from a blag called The Whited Sepulchre. It rants against "locavores" who want to ...
Jim Breuer on democracy
Saturday, October 23rd, 2010I really liked actor-comedian Jim Breuer's perspective on politics and democracy on the Regular Guys Show on Friday, October 22, 2010. He was an in-studio guest, and he stuck around for the last news segment of the morning. When the news guy brought up the local elections and the fact ...
China’s 25-year government-bloat plan
Saturday, October 2nd, 2010According to Thomas Friedman, China is doing moon shots. Yes, that’s plural. When I say “moon shots” I mean big, multibillion-dollar, 25-year-horizon, game-changing investments. China has at least four going now: one is building a network of ultramodern airports; another is building a web of high-speed trains connecting major cities; a ...
The Great Material Continuum
Monday, June 7th, 2010Star Trek presented a notoriously bad conception of economics because of creator Gene Roddenberry's insistence that humans and all other races belonging to the United Federation of Planets would use no money. Science-fiction author Gardner Goldsmith explained why this economic ideal was not only fantasy but would result in material ...
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, October 16th, 2009Charles Johnson, October 14, 2009: If you want a recipe for real disgust with the prevailing political establishment, and a real opening for radical critique, one of the things that has to happen is that dissidents need to begin to see that even the longed-for best-case scenario can’t possibly deliver what ...
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 ...
Facebook “thoughts” of the day
Saturday, April 4th, 2009A friend's Facebook status: "...says its about time the government passes some serious gun control laws. to hell with the right to bear arms." Her friends' responses: "hear hear!" "No guns and arms? That settles it, no more gym." (admittedly, kind of funny) "But then what the hell am I going ...
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 ...
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 ...
Barack Obama: window breaker extraordinaire 2
Sunday, December 7th, 2008From an Associated Press article: President-elect Barack Obama said Saturday that he wants to revive the economy and create jobs by upgrading roads, schools and energy efficiency in a public-works program whose scale has been unseen since construction of the interstate highway system in the 1950s. He offered no price estimate for ...
More thoughts on the auto bailout
Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008All I hear about in the news segments of morning radio here in Michigan is how "we" desperately need a government bailout of the Big Three automakers, and how letting them go bankrupt will be a disaster for many industries other than Detroit automakers, and how it isn't fair for ...
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 ...
Sarah Palin: same old neoconservatism cost them election
Tuesday, November 11th, 2008From an article at Politico.com, reporting on an interview that appeared in the Anchorage Daily News, we learn that Sarah Palin blames her and McCain's defeat on the fact that their campaign represented the "status quo" and that the people wanted change—anything different from the Bush regime—and the McCain/Palin ticket ...
Almost vindicated
Wednesday, November 5th, 2008One of the main reasons I wrote that it's understandable to vote was to spread publicity about anti-establishment, anti-State candidates and thereby make a more specific, public statement of disapproval with the system (as opposed to the silent, inactive form of disapproval that is complete abstention). That's why I had ...
Mob-rule is the answer
Wednesday, September 24th, 2008Yeah, 'cause that worked real great in ancient Athens.
The Republocrats are ALL against us
Wednesday, September 24th, 2008Brad at WendyMcElroy.com is right on the money: If the bailout accomplishes nothing else, it may expose the charade of the "two-party" system to a few more eyes. The Democrats' excuse for supporting so much atrocious Bush legislation (Patriot Act, use of force, Military Commissions Act, warrantless wiretapping, etc.) has traditionally been ...
“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 ...
What libertarianism isn’t 2
Thursday, July 24th, 2008In summary: It isn't democracy, with good reason. In my last post I quoted an anti-libertarian commenter on some Statist blag who thought that libertarians wanted to do whatever they wanted to whomever they wanted whenever they wanted, and that no law or police force should stop them. I'll remind you ...
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 ...
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, ...
Juror conscription is not a civic duty
Friday, May 23rd, 2008I wonder if anyone but myself, who is pretty thoroughly obsessed with quotations from famous figures throughout history, enjoys our random quote generator that Kel put at the top of our page. (He didn't write the code, he just put it up there; the plugin is by Dustin Barnes.) I ...
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 ...
The economy is worse than you know
Saturday, May 10th, 2008I must offer a small retraction and an apology to at least a small number of MSM-print journalists out there because apparently some of them still do some worthy political commentating and question the establishment on serious matters. Kevin Phillips of Harper's Magazine wrote sort of an exposé on the ...
Statolatry on the radio
Monday, April 21st, 2008A quibble I have with women, by and large, as regards their moral-political thought processes is that they are too hesitant to take a definitive side, to make a polarizing statement, to pronounce a strong (negative) judgment of people, ideas, or institutions. I made sure to say "by and large" ...
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 ...
Orwellian Real ID tyranny
Sunday, April 6th, 2008After Anthony Gregory's announcements on the LRC blag and Mises blag introducing the Independent Institute's new blag, The Beacon, I realized that my recent lament that Gregory has only recently resumed regular blagging was misinformed; he has apparently been writing for that blag since October and was, in fact, its ...
The collapse of the nation-state
Tuesday, February 26th, 2008Gary North wrote a fantastic column explaining why he thinks the central government of the United States will slowly decay until it collapses, and why he expects minarchism to return to this country during the lives of his grandchildren. He starts out with a list of government functions that libertarians ...
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 Ron Paul and the Bhutto assassination
Friday, December 28th, 2007Insightful, incisive, and correct, as usual. Money quote: "I'm increasingly coming to believe that Democrats are stupid, and Republicans are insane. Both conditions result in the advocacy of that which will inevitably lead to evil. In fact, that will be my explanation the next time someone asks me why I ...
Rhino Repellant
Wednesday, December 26th, 2007Wow, it seems that by agreeing to begin a libertarian blag with my friend John, I seemingly have unleashed a monster onto the world. When he approached me with the idea, I was concerned that we would not have frequent enough updates. It seems this fear was absolutely unfounded, since ...
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 ...