Free Speech and Privilege
There are occasions, in the halls of public discourse, where high-concept exposition turns into farce, where an author's grand ideas depict a lack of self-awareness so monumental that it defies belief. Consider a deeply self-important op-ed by K-Sue Park, published in...
Nazis, Statues, and Slippery Slopes
Musician Jeff Hanneman, recently-deceased guitarist and lyricist for the heavy metal band Slayer, wrote a song called Angel of Death about the Nazi monster Josef Mengele. The song, the first track on the album Reign in Blood (1986), was controversial from the outset,...
Scrubbing History
Efforts to denude the South of Confederacy statues, memorials, flags, and other historical depictions have accelerated rapidly in the wake of the Charlottesville white supremacist rally and Antifa counter-rally. A mob mentality has started to creep in, with wanton...
Political Isotopes
Julie Borowski, a libertarian blogger, recently asked "Can the commies and Nazis just destroy each other?" This question, which if actualized would make for a much better world, suggests (at least to us nerdy types) a matter-antimatter annihilation. Yes, indeed, the...
The Hypocrisy Wars
The aftermath of a grotesque display by the worst sorts of racists (actual ones, mind you, not the sort of soft racism that identity-politics- and social-justice-warriors accuse even the best-intentioned and best-hearted people of), and Trump's infuriatingly...
Internet Muscles
My main Facebook feed is not normally populated by too much in the way of politics. Sure, I have a couple political "friends," i.e. people who friended me via some political forums, who have 4999 other friends and post politics 50x a day, but they can be counted on...
Washington Monument Syndrome Goes To War
Bellum Se Ipsum Alet - War Feeds Itself As has been a theme in these pages: when problems are solved politically, political power becomes entrenched and unadaptive; the problem then exists outside a rational feedback loop, and costs and benefit calculations are...
Trusting Your Beliefs
Consider the notion that shutting down someone else's words with violence or the threat thereof is acceptable behavior. As in "if you speak, I/we will assault you or riot, and either you or people you care about may be harmed." This idea goes well beyond drowning out...
Markets, Regulation, and Opportunity Cost
A friend in one of my political groups shared a quote culled from a Wall Street Journal comments-section discussion: Government regulation also creates markets in the first place. Markets aren't naturally occurring phenomena. The quote, meant to rebut the proposition...
Cops and Donuts
A Lesson in Economic Liberty Sometimes, it is the cliche that perpetuates the tale. A story in yesterday's New York Post would be much less of one had it been about, say, doctors or firefighters and donuts, but when it's cops and donuts, the incident catches wide...
Underestimating Human Ingenuity
There is a very common human failure, one born out of hubris, self-centeredness, and a touch of solipsism. It can be expressed as "if I, personally, can't envision how something would work, then it won't." Phrased thus, it sounds silly, but it's an attitude that's at...
Sorry, Greens, Carbon Energy is Here To Stay
According to Al Gore, Prince Charles, Bill Nye, and a host of other high-profile enviro-scolds, the world's burning of carbon fuels is the death knell of civilization itself. Setting their hyperbole aside - the current state of knowledge points more towards...
Hating Entrepreneurship
Creative Destruction. Two words that summarize the free market's perpetual pressures, the constant improvements in productivity that make our lives wealthier, easier, and better. New ways of doing things replace old ones. Printing presses replaced scribes. Farm...
How Many More Lives?
It has been a scant few years since leftists, liberals, progressives, and statist dreamers sang the praises of Venezuela's socialism. The roster of famous praisers includes Noam Chomsky, Oliver Stone, Jesse Jackson, Michael Moore, Jeremy Corbyn, a Hillary Clinton...
Slacktivism and Umbranosh
Having spent a lot of time in the poor precincts of New York City I can advise with perfect confidence: the unfortunate and neglected, sick, mentally ill, drug and alcohol dependent, care nothing for what the better-off write and share on social media. None of this...
Pounding the Table
Many of Trump's cabinet appointments have elicited howls of outrage, but one that stands out from the pack is that of Betsy DeVos to Education. DeVos was beset upon all sides by the public-education-monopoly apologists, the teachers unions, the knee-jerk progressives,...
The Fruits of Ignorance
Christopher Nolan's much-anticipated war movie Dunkirk opened this past weekend. Highly anticipated and stellarly-reviewed, it tells one of the great stories of 20th century history: the rescue of 400,000 British, French and Belgian soldiers from a French beach during...
Muh Roads and Mileage Taxes
If you're a libertarian who's wallowed in that political mud for a while, you know the "Muh roads!" gag. The rest of you - the normal people who may even know a fair bit about libertarianism but haven't spent endless hours debating it? You're probably puzzled. That's...
The Freddie Gray and Washington Monument Syndromes Synergize
Consider two recent examples of the resistance to change that politically entrenched organizations put forth, two sides of the same coin, that go together like peanut butter and chocolate. One, which I am dubbing the Freddie Gray syndrome, is the argument that reforms...
Don’t Steal…
The Government Hates Competition A heretofore under-reported bit of government odiousness is finally getting the headline treatment it so richly deserves. Civil asset forfeiture, where government seizes money and property it believes was involved in or the result of a...
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