December 2010
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Too Many Wrong About WikiLeaks
It’s unfortunate that when Republicans and Democrats seem to find consensus, it’s usually in favor of bigger government.
This axiom is holding strong in the wake of the WikiLeaks controversy.
Because all government power comes from the people, the government doesn’t have any power over people that the people don’t already have. This is a fundamental self-ownership...
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Chicago parents scramble with new rules for best... →
“I feel like I’m at the mercy of this system, like the fate of my 4-year-old is in the hands of a plastic (lottery) ball.” [said Rosa Yang Kato, concerned mother.]
Every year, the competition for a precious spot in the city’s top schools is fierce. Many neighborhood schools have significantly lower test scores, and parents see the competitive and magnet programs as their...
The Gold Standard Never Dies →
Welcome to the age of paper money, where governments and central banks can manufacture as much money as they want without limit. Gold was the last limit. Its banishment as a standard unleashed the inflation monster and Leviathan itself, which has swelled beyond comprehension.
But guess what? Gold actually hasn’t gone anywhere. It is still the hedge of choice, the thing that every investor...
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TSA: The Thoughtless, Dataless Panopticon →
November 2010
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“War is the health of the state.”
– Randolph Bourne
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Minimum Wage, Maximum Folly →
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Ron Paul: Don't Raise the Debt Ceiling! →
The upcoming vote will provide an interesting litmus test for the new Republican congressional majority, especially those new members closely identified with Tea Party voters. The debt ceiling law, passed in 1917, enables Congress to place a statutory cap on the total amount of government debt rather than having to approve each individual Treasury bond offering. It also, however, forces Congress...
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The Big Dump →
We’ll be chewing on this cud for quite a while – there’s a lot of material in this WikiLeaks document dump – but of one thing we can be sure: the US government’s shameless attack on WikiLeaks, and Julian Assange, its founder, will continue and even escalate. Under pressure from the US, the Swedes have reversed their earlier reversal of an indictment for “rape and sexual molestation,” and have...
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NYT Leftist Hypocrisy →
“The documents appear to have been acquired illegally and contain all manner of private information and statements that were never intended for the public eye, so they won’t be posted here.”—New York Times, on the Climategate emails, Nov. 20, 2009
“The articles published today and in coming days are based on thousands of United States embassy cables, the daily reports from the field...
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“If philanthropy is not voluntary, it destroys liberty and justice. The law can...”
– Frédéric Bastiat (via jessarmentrout)
Did the Midterms Matter? →
One of the key issues in the midterms was out-of-control government spending. Indeed, the cri de guerre of the pivotal Tea Party movement is a straightforward plea to “Stop the Spending.” There’s little reason to expect the Republican majority in the House to push for much in the way of serious budget cuts. We know this because of the Pledge to America, the pre-election plan...
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“Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the...”
– H. L. Mencken
SEIU to Drop Insurance for Thousands, After... →
(via evilteabagger)
NYT: Distorting, Censoring, Suppressing the Truth →
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TSA’s Strip/Grope: Unconstitutional, Unnecessary →
Writing in the Washington Post, George Washington University law professor Jeffrey Rosen carefully concludes, “there’s a strong argument that the TSA’s measures violate the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures.” The strip/grope policy doesn’t carefully escalate through levels of intrusion the way a better designed program using more privacy protective technology...
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“Once the government becomes the supplier of people’s needs, there is no limit to...”
– Lawrence Auster (via dofl)
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The FBI thwarts its own Terrorist plot →
The FBI is obviously quite pleased with itself over its arrest of a 19-year-old Somali-American, Mohamed Osman Mohamud, who — with months of encouragement, support and money from the FBI’s own undercover agents — allegedly attempted to detonate a bomb at a crowded Christmas event in Portland, Oregon. Media accounts are almost uniformly trumpeting this event exactly as...
Where the Bourgeois Virtues Are Found →
[M]arket relationships civilize us and lead us to treat one another, especially strangers, with openness and kindness, which was previously unknown in history. In the words of economic anthropologist Paul Seabright, markets turn strangers into “honorary kin.”
Markets do this because they encourage us to treat others as equals in that we approach them, especially strangers, most often as...
Puritanical progressives →
Progressivism is a faith-based program. The progressives’ agenda for improving everyone else varies but invariably involves the cult of expertise - an unflagging faith in the application of science to social reform. Progressivism’s itch to perfect people by perfecting the social environment can produce an interesting phenomenon - the Pecksniffian progressive.
Failed Fed →
[E]ven if politics never enters into the decision-making of Fed officials, and even if those officials are guaranteed always to be the saintliest and most morally courageous human beings who ever breathed, having a monopoly money supplier is a very bad idea.
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“Under communist rule in the Soviet Union, the 3 percent of agricultural land...”
– Steven Plaut (via coeus)
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Economics, the Environment, and Environmysticism →
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The Real Threat to America →
I don’t doubt the patriotism of the Americans involved in keeping the country safe, nor do I discount the threat, but I am sure of this: The unfettered growth of the Department of Homeland Security and the T.S.A. represent a greater long-term threat to the prosperity, character and wellbeing of the United States than a few madmen in the valleys of Waziristan or the voids of Yemen.
America is a...
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Gawker Just Wants to Be Clear
Obama likes to make himself perfectly clear. We’ve all noticed that he says “Let me be clear,” or a derivative thereof, a lot. The people around him have, at least subconsciously, picked up on his phrase and have been using it themselves since the campaign.
His followers have also adopted this language. Gawker media runs a number of very popular blogs. I subscribe to io9,...
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TSA Outrage Roundup 11/26
The TSA’s False Tradeoff The national furor over the TSA’s new procedures — culminating in yesterday’s”Opt Out Day” — has elicited the typical response from the bureaucracy and its apologists. Why, these invasive scans and “enhanced pat-downs” are only for your good, in order to ensure safe flying. You don’t want another attack, do you? This is a...
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TSA Gestapo Empire →
Make up your own mind. What terrifies you the most. Terrorists, who in all likelihood you will never encounter in your lifetime, or the TSA that you will encounter every time you fly and soon, according to Pistole, every time you take a train, a subway, or drive in a car or truck?
Before making up your mind, consider this report from antiwar.com on November 19: “TSA officials say that...
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Torture Tort Terror →
During his presidential campaign, Barack Obama criticized the Bush administration for its excessive secrecy, noting that it had “invoked a legal tool known as the ‘state secrets’ privilege more than any other previous administration to get cases thrown out of civil court.” Obama also promised to end “extraordinary rendition,” a practice through which “we outsource our torture to other...
Alaska native status gave tiny, inexperienced firm... →
Ah, government…
In summer 2008, the U.S. military had a major problem. More than 2,400 service members had reported being sexually assaulted the previous year, and the number was rising. Congress wanted immediate action.
The Army responded by reaching out to a tiny firm in Delaware. It was an unlikely choice for such a sensitive task. The year before, United Solutions and Services, known...
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The TSA and Totalitarianism →
I believe one of the most serious misunderstandings about totalitarianism is that it arrives as a full package that requires no assembly. That it is put on the people, like a winter coat. All at one time, and in full view for all to see. …
It’s clear what totalitarianism looks like and when I see it in America, I am going to object loud and clear. Whether it is groping TSA agents,...
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“Whenever men are allowed liberty, and freedom of choice, they will make...”
– Henry Hazlitt (via jessarmentrout)
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TSA: Travel is a Privilege →
Also see: The Case Against the TSA.
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California Legalizes Theft of Private Property →
I’ve previously ranted about how California is a Fascist-Marxist Republic. Here, California takes another step to solidify its position:
Is Your New Neighbor A Squatter? Now California law allows an individual to acquire title to a property if they’ve fenced it, openly occupied it without permission and paid property taxes continuously for five years under a provision called adverse...
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“The notion that production and economic activity are harmful to the environment...”
– George Reisman - A Primer on Natural Resources and the Environment
'Insider Trading' Is Not a Crime →
To me, and to most people who really have any actual understanding of ethics and morality, in a land of freedom, which ours was meant to be but obviously isn’t, the only categories of acts that should be considered “against the law” are theft, trespass, fraud and actual physical aggression against others. It’s all based on the same kind of private property rights that the American...
A Tale of Two Colonies →
At Thanksgiving, Americans recall their blessings around bountiful meals, with imagery going back to the Pilgrims, especially Plymouth Colony’s 1623 Thanksgiving. But little attention is paid to what allows that bounty to be created — capitalism — though Jamestown and Plymouth both illustrate that lesson.
Reflections restricted to our current bounty ignore that most colonists in both...
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Airport Security May Not Work, But It Does Cause... →
[T]he devices currently in use and proposed for wider deployment this year currently deliver to the scalp “20 times the average dose that is typically quoted by TSA and throughout the industry.” Dr. Brenner has pointed out that the majority of the radiation from X-ray backscatter machines strikes the top of the head, which is where 85 percent of the 800,000 cases of basal cell carcinoma...
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Understanding the DeLay Verdict →
Had to reblog this in its entirety:
While I am sure that the guilty verdict against Tom DeLay will be popular among a lot of groups, one has to realize just how contrived the entire thing really was, and I can assure you that if the prosecutors get away with this, libertarians such as ourselves will be in the crosshairs of future prosecutions. Let me explain.
The first charges against DeLay...
Plenty to Be Thankful For →
In some ways, being thankful for what we have is tougher than usual in 2010. We remain, judging by the sluggish unemployment rate, mired in perhaps the worst recession since World War II. We are approaching $14 trillion in government debt without any idea how its growth will be slowed, much less how it might get reduced. We have an out-of-control Federal Reserve that is so worried about “the...
Things to Be Thankful For →
Not long ago a journalist asked me what freedoms we take for granted in America. Now, I spend most of my time sounding the alarm about the freedoms we’re losing. But this was a good opportunity to step back and consider how America is different from much of world history — and why immigrants still flock here.
If we ask how life in the United States is different from life in most of the history...
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Why Sports Fans Should Be Libertarians →
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The Statist Media and the TSA
I mentioned the statist, primarily leftist, media in my Case Against the TSA, but here are a few more links to chew on.
Conservatives, Liberals, and the TSA Libertarians often debate whether conservatives or liberals are more friendly to liberty. We often fall back on the idea that conservatives tend to support economic liberties but not civil liberties, while liberals support civil liberties but...
