Political Liberty
Articles showing a positive influence of political
action on the cause of Liberty.
Among the Fellow Travelers
by Radley Balko from Tech Central Station
"The drug prohibition issue was particularly heartening, mostly because it wasn't an issue at all. While the Drug Policy Alliance and the Libertarian Party both had a decriminalization presence, conservative anti-drug groups like the Drug Free America Foundation were nowhere to be found."
http://www.techcentralstation.com/022505A.html
Progressive Outreach
by Joey B. King from RationalReview.com
"I think it is safe to say that everyone was interested in a bottom-up approach to activism rather than the top-down model that has been in place within the Left for the last few years. This sounds like Libertythink to me!"
http://www.rationalreview.com/guest/k021705.shtml
Congressional Sadists
by Sheldon Richman from The Future of Freedom Foundation
"Move tax day to the day before election day. And for good measure, abolish withholding. Imagine if people trudged to the polls the day after sending fat checks to the IRS. That might bring the incumbents down a notch."
http://www.fff.org/comment/com0502i.asp
Life in Amerika
Articles depicting the negative impact of politics
on the cause of Liberty.
Putting 'home' back in homeland
by Robyn E. Blumner from St. Petersburg Times
"Having a home is the consummate American dream, representing security and accomplishment. It is an ideal that crosses the ideological spectrum. And the specter of the government's confiscating a home to give it to private developers to generate a more lucrative tax base is more than anathema, it's a violation of the essential promise of this nation to its people."
http://www.sptimes.com/2005/02/20/Columns/Putting__home__back_i.shtml
Revolting Development
by Jacob Sullum from Reason
"The Fifth Amendment, which says private property may not 'be taken for public use without just compensation,' is supposed to protect people from such arbitrary redistribution. But compensation often falls woefully short of just. In dictating the price, for example, the government does not consider the very thing that supposedly justifies the condemnation: the highly profitable use to which the developer will put the property."
http://www.reason.com/sullum/022505.shtml
Weak-kneed corporate CEO's
by Walter E. Williams from Townhall.com
"Corporate Social Responsibility Watch (csrwatch.com) keeps an eye on the leftist attack on American corporations and corporate cowardice in the face of these attacks. Last year, CSRW listed the 'Top Ten Worst Moments in Free Enterprise for 2004'."
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/walterwilliams/ww20050224.shtml
Ordered Liberty without the
State
Some people say it's Anarchy, some say it's not
possible. It is an interesting topic.
Ordained By the State: A Recipe for Failure
by Michael Gaddy from LewRockwell.com
"We have absolutely no chance of ever returning this nation to the one envisioned by Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry and other true patriots as long as we allow the State to dictate the standards and the curriculum for the education of our children. The State and liberty are diametrically opposed."
http://www.lewrockwell.com/gaddy/gaddy11.html
Public Goods: Not a Problem -- A Study of an Extreme Case
by Silas Barta from anti-state.com
"[I]t is ambiguous which system has a greater free rider problem. In market anarchy, it's possible that ... almost everyone contributes to the city's defense. On the other hand, it's possible that in a democracy, huge swaths of people pay nothing for the city's defense."
http://www.anti-state.com/article.php?article_id=462
A Real Ownership Society
by Lex Concord from The Libertarian Enterprise
"In a real ownership society, you wouldn't have much use for politicians or bureaucrats, which is probably why none of them will ever propose anything remotely resembling one."
http://www.ncc-1776.com/tle2005/tle307-20050220-08.html
Spreading Decentralism
Articles demonstrating an increase in the dispersal
of power.
Blogs or Blotto?
by Butler Shaffer from LewRockwell.com
"There is nothing 'faddish' about the collapse of vertically-structured institutional systems, and the emergence of horizontal networks of interconnected individuals. Centralized systems are rapidly becoming decentralized -- a matter about which I have written before -- producing a fundamental change in how people will organize themselves in society."
http://www.lewrockwell.com/shaffer/shaffer97.html
Let a Hundred Cases Bloom
by Mark Moller from Cato Institute
"How to decentralize? First, the existing rules that favor transferring all related federal class actions to one federal court should be changed. More, not fewer, judges should hear these suits. Second, Congress must pass the Right to Choose Your Own Lawyer Act, soon to be introduced by Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Calif.). It would break class actions into smaller parcels."
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=3687
Social Security Reform: A Free-Market Alternative
by George Reisman from Ludwig von Mises Institute
"The end of Social Security would be the end of something that should never have been started in the first place. The root of the system is the philosophy of collectivism, in that it forces everyone into a giant stewpot as it were, in which individuals are compelled to support the parents and grandparents of total strangers, whether they want to or not, in exchange for themselves later on being compulsorily supported by the children and grandchildren of total strangers."
http://www.mises.org/fullstory.aspx?Id=1751
The New World Hegemon
Depictions of the coming Imperial power
The Agents of Instability -- Bush Outfoxed by Bin Laden
by Paul Craig Roberts from CounterPunch
"The neoconservatives are the greatest threat America has ever faced, and they control the Office of the President, the Office of the Vice President, the Department of State, the Department of Defense, and the police state apparatus known as 'Homeland Security'."
http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts02222005.html
War Crimes
by Nat Hentoff from Village Voice
"This report by Jane Mayer should be read by every member of Congress, which has yet to conduct a substantive investigation -- with subpoena powers -- into these horrific practices. There's talk of only a cursory "review." Much more is needed."
http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0508,hentoff,61345,6.html
Man, Technology and State
by Scott Horton from Antiwar.com
"Will we be able retain our old ideals of liberty as we scan our eyeballs and thumbs at the nearest DHS checkpoint? It may take a massive effort from us all to preserve what's left of our human cultures and liberties to avoid a future as bleak as the one Mr. Postman feared was coming."
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/horton.php?articleid=4970
Politics by Other Means
War, rumors of war, and politicians fomenting war.
The Budget Two-Step
by David Boaz from Cato Institute
"President Bush proposes that the federal government spend $2.57 trillion, or $2,570 billion, in the next fiscal year. That's 38 percent more than the federal government was spending in the last year of President Bill Clinton's term. ... You'd have to be Jabba the Hutt to see that as a lean budget."
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=3686
The Fever Swamps of Kansas
by Jesse Walker from Reason
"A specter once haunted the Great Plains of America: the specter of populism." This is an insightful review of What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, by Thomas Frank.
http://www.reason.com/0503/cr.jw.the.shtml
An Elective Despotism
by Sheldon Richman from The Future of Freedom Foundation
"The United States unquestionably has the trappings of representative government. Americans vote for officeholders on a regular basis, and these officeholders, in theory, vote on issues with their constituents' interests in mind. From the outside it sure looks like representative democracy. But looks can be deceiving, and in this case they are. Big government cannot be truly representative because it is beyond the ability of the people to monitor it."
http://www.fff.org/comment/com0502h.asp
Spontaneous Order
Articles showing decentralized successes.
Book Review: U.S. Economic Freedom Index
by Sunni Maravillosa from The Price of Liberty
"While there's a lot of fairly sophisticated statistical stuff in U.S. Economic Freedom Index: 2004 Report, that doesn't mean that only economists, policy wonks, or others with statistical backgrounds will find value in it. Huang, McCormick, and McQuillan do a good job of relating their methods and findings in terms that an interested lay person can follow, particularly in the chapter summaries."
http://www.thepriceofliberty.org/05/02/23/sunni.htm
The Futility of Labels
by James Leroy Wilson from LewRockwell.com
"Libertarianism in its economic sense is really about freeing the small entrepreneur from onerous taxes and regulations, about liberating impoverished communities to build markets on their own and for themselves. But that agenda is more important than its name. I hope it can be called libertarian, and I hope I can conscientiously call myself a libertarian until I die. But the definitions of words are fleeting things."
http://www.lewrockwell.com/wilson-jl/wilson-james22.html
Requiem for a Heavyweight?
by L. Reichard White from America in Denial
"[S]pontaneous order consistently kicks centralist booty every time, even though the hierarchist-centralists don't get it. The success of free-trade should tip everyone off that you don't want to go up against spontaneous order, not even if you've got the biggest baddest military in the history of the world."
http://americaindenial.com/?q=node/99
Nonspontaneous Disorder
Articles showing centrally planned disasters.
Set Thine Own House in Order
by Jonathan David Morris from The Free Liberal
"If modern America had half as many testicles as it claims to, we would do away with all such arrangements and start forcing companies to answer to us -- to we, the people -- instead of the profit-sharers working in town hall. ... And the only reason they get away with it is because most people are too busy paying their bills and putting their kids through school to pick up a pitchfork and start the revolution."
http://www.freeliberal.com/archives/000772.html
Father Knows Best?
by Sandy Szwarc from Tech Central Station
"Consumers generally assume that healthcare policies and insurance rates are made by unbiased experts and have science behind them. But as Dr. Henry Miller of Hoover Institution noted in a recent TCS article, government health officials have made one bad decision after another that squander valuable resources and place consumers at added risk."
http://www.techcentralstation.com/022805D.html
Food for Thought on Childhood Obesity
by Radley Balko from FOXNews.com
"The children of active parents tend to be active. Kids tend to eat what their moms and dads eat. That said, there's also some evidence that the caloric intake among kids hasn't changed all that much over the last quarter-century. What has changed is the amount of time kids are active, outside and exercising."
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,148208,00.html
War Is The Health Of The State
War is the ultimate State intervention in society.
Under False Colors
by L. Neil Smith from The Libertarian Enterprise
"What history does show is that warmongering tyrants from Lincoln to Wilson to Roosevelt to Bush have always made the same claim that Mike does in order to get what they want. What they want, of course, is war, which is the health of the state, and of their political careers."
http://www.ncc-1776.com/tle2005/tle307-20050220-02.html
The Mind of the Terrorist
by Bob Wallace from Endervidualism
"All terrorists see things as either good or bad, black or white, with nothing in-between. Of course, they see themselves as good, which is why they are paranoid about people hating them 'for their goodness.' They are utopians and idealists. As such, they believe in destroying society so a new, better one can arise. Whom they destroy in the process is irrelevant; they are necessary sacrifices...."
http://endervidualism.com/bwallace/mind_of_terrorist.htm
Soulless Soldiers
by Teresa Whitehurst from Antiwar.com
"The Bush administration is head over heels in love with death, and American culture is changing rapidly in response. When influential men in the U.S. military and the mainstream media call killing 'a hoot' and torture 'a fraternity prank' without losing their jobs, the veneer of 'moral values' and 'Christian principles' chips away, revealing what lies beneath."
http://www.antiwar.com/whitehurst/?articleid=4911
Bits of History
The Past seen with a fresh look.
How Medical Boards Nationalized Health Care
by Henry E. Jones from Ludwig von Mises Institute
"Such combining of state and corporate entities is not unique to this AMA/state medical board combo. It was a popular approach at the start of the twentieth century. The common name for this arrangement is fascism. As Benito Mussolini pointed out, 'fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.' Therefore what we have here in the United States is medical corporatism or medical fascism -- or, even more precisely, a medical fascist monopoly."
http://www.mises.org/fullstory.aspx?Id=1749
Brothers In Arms
by Dave Kopel from Reason
"The civil rights movement of the twentieth century is rightly celebrated as one of the greatest victories of non-violent protest in history. But avoiding aggressive violence does not mean submitting passively to thugs and murderers. As even the most committed civil rights advocates understood, self-defense is an essential human right; the effect, and often the intent, of gun laws was to take that right away from people who had no other protection."
http://www.reason.com/hod/dk022405.shtml
Corporatism and Socialism in America
by Anthony Gregory from The Future of Freedom Foundation
"Corporate interests pushed through the most significant Progressive-Era government reforms in order to guarantee profits, which they had been losing to smaller businesses that had emerged in the relatively free market of the early 20th century."
http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0411e.asp
War and Peace
Articles showing the nature of War.
Saber Rattling Against Syria
by Ivan Eland from The Independent Institute
"President Bush has actually declared that he would not ease relations even if the Iranians gave up their nuclear program. Why should those regimes improve their behavior if they feel that they can do nothing right and the goal posts keep moving back when they take a step, however tentative, in a positive direction?"
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1466
Gulf War 1991: Prefiguration and prelude to the 2003 Iraq debacle - Part Two
by Stephen J. Sniegoski from The Last Ditch
"[T]he United States had a UN mandate to liberate Kuwait, not remove Saddam. To attempt the latter would have caused the warring coalition to fall apart. America's coalition partners in the region, especially Turkey and Saudi Arabia, feared that the elimination of Saddam's government would cause Iraq to fragment into warring ethnic and religious groups."
http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_prefiguration_02.htm
Bush: 1914, 1938, 2005
by Christopher Preble from Cato Institute
"Many Europeans assume that President Bush will take his lessons from 1938, rather than 1914. A recent poll found that 70 percent of Germans expect that the United States is planning a military attack on Iran."
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=3692
Great Individuals In History
Some people stand out from the crowd.
Artist - Winslow Homer : Feb. 24, 1836
from Island of Freedom
"Taking up solitary residence on the Maine coast at Prout's Neck, he produced such masterpieces of realism as Eight Bells (1886, Addison Gallery, Andover, Massachusetts); in it the drama of the sea scene is imbued with an epic, heroic quality that symbolizes the dominant theme of his maturity: human struggle with the forces of nature."
http://www.island-of-freedom.com/WINSLOW.HTM
Cartoonist - Tex Avery : Feb. 26, 1908
from texavery.com
"In 1935, Tex went to work at Warner Bros. where he created Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, and created the personality of Bugs Bunny. He was with Warner from 1935-1941. During this time, he created animation that was a far cry from all the Disney imitators out there. Unlike Disney, Tex Avery's cartoons had their own personality."
http://www.texavery.com/story/
Writer - Theodore Sturgeon : Feb. 26, 1918
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"Sturgeon wrote the screenplays for the Star Trek episodes "Shore Leave" (1966) and "Amok Time" (1967, later published in book form in 1978). ... Sturgeon also wrote several episodes of Star Trek that were never produced. One of these was notable for having first introduced the Prime Directive."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Sturgeon
Culcha'
Books, Movies, TV, Media, Music, poetry, etc.
Edward Scissorhands (1990)
Reviewed by Tom Ender from Endervidualism
"The movie demonstrates the double-edged nature of individuality. The human need to belong often conflicts with each of our special natures. Individuality is what differentiates us from others. With such differentiation, our special abilities can stand out and exalt the individual. However, with that exaltation, the individual may be identified as very different."
http://endervidualism.com/agora/ed_scissorhands_1990.htm
Hunter Thompson -- All Gone Now
by Fred Reed from FredOnEverything
"When Thompson blew his brains out, a door closed somewhere and you could hear the latch click. The main man had gone. Most of us can easily be replaced. There was only one Hunter Thompson. I’ll heist one tonight to a fine, fine writer, a voice of his time, the embodiment of an age the like of which there never was and which, for good or bad, will never come again."
http://fredoneverything.net/Thompson.shtml
The 'Roots' schoolteacher talks
by Vin Suprynowicz from Las Vegas Review-Journal
"But the Becker Middle School administrators don't have to worry about Joe Silvestri teaching anything controversial in his history class anymore. Because he doesn't teach history, anymore."
http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2005/Feb-20-Sun-2005/opinion/535202.html
The lighter side
Humor, satire, cartoons, parodies, food, popular
music and other things to amuse.
Nuclear Fashions for Spring!
by Mark Fiore from The Village Voice
"It's the Bomb...."
http://villagevoice.com/news/0509,fiore,61502,9.html
Rummy TV
by Arianna Huffington from WorkingForChange
"Now the Bushies are taking things to the next level. Not content to buy their press coverage retail, they are producing and distributing their own news network. And, no, I'm not talking about Fox. It's the Pentagon Channel, a 24/7 niche network brought to you by the Department of Defense." It has gotten to the stage where The Onion is perhaps superfluous.
http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=18617
I Support The Occupation Of Iraq, But I Don't Support Our Troops
from The Onion
"It is ridiculous that my 'heart' is somehow morally or ethically obliged to 'go out' to the troops. In fact, had the troops not been put to productive labor by the sheer might and institutional authority of the U.S. military, a good number of them would be sitting around bars, drinking and gambling." Satire.
http://www.theonion.com/opinion/index.php?issue=4108&o=2
Deep Thought
Scientific and scholarly studies, philosophical
essays, in-depth and longer articles
Summers Falls In Winter's Spring -- Personally, I'd Rather Have A Possum As President Of Harvard
by Fred Reed from FredOnEverything
"The intelligence of men at the high end, plus their assertiveness and their interest in machines and in building things, is responsible for most of civilization. The male desire to fight, as innate as a dog’s desire to pee on hydrants, is a most hideously destructive phenomenon. The question for civilization is how to harness the horsepower of men for useful purposes without letting them engage in their preferred sports: butchery, burning, the sacking of cities, and armed robbery."
http://fredoneverything.net/Summers.shtml
The Anguish of Central Banking 2005
by Antony P. Mueller from Ludwig von Mises Institute
"Seen in a long-term historical perspective, we still live in an inflationary age, and the turning point for the U.S. can be clearly defined in 1914 when the US central bank began its operations. It took only a couple of years for the newly created Federal Reserve System to create an inflationary boom ushering the way to the Great Depression later on."
http://www.mises.org/fullstory.aspx?Id=1748
Making the best of garbage gas
by Duncan Graham-Rowe from New Scientist
"Methane forms in landfill when organic waste decomposes in the absence of oxygen. At some landfills the gas is collected and used to power vehicles or to heat nearby buildings. Till now this has been practical only for landfills that produce large volumes of methane. But Viktor Popov at the Wessex Institute of Technology, in Southampton, UK, says simple modifications to existing landfills will make it possible to extract methane from any site."
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7048
Miscellany
Articles not easily classified
I Spy A Sellout -- Kurt Andersen, you're old and you suck.
by Matt Taibbi from New York Press
"Even the original Hobbesian choice was horseshit, especially in the eyes of the stereotypical New York liberal Andersen is addressing. We no more have to choose between chaos and authoritarianism than we do between rooting for Bush and rooting for the insurgents. There is a vast array of other outcomes and developments to root for."
http://www.nypress.com/18/8/news&columns/taibbi.cfm
Why Men Earn More
by Wendy McElroy from ifeminists.com
"A government that discriminates on the basis of sex or race violates a basic principle of justice. The law must apply to every human being equally."
http://www.ifeminists.net/introduction/editorials/2005/0223.html
The Era of Big Government is Back
by Chuck Baldwin from NewsWithViews.com
"Democrats must be green with envy at the ability of the Republican Party to explode the growth of the federal government and still bask in the reputation as a 'conservative' party. The truth is, however, there is no conservative party in Washington, D.C., today. Both parties are intoxicated with an insatiable thirst for unrestricted federal spending!"
http://www.newswithviews.com/baldwin/baldwin217.htm