Author Archives: Mark

A libertarian telling the Right where they go wrong

Over at The Agitator, guest blogger Jason Kuznicki has a terrific post titled “An Open Letter to My Friends on the Right,” in which he tries to explain how the right wing gets freedom wrong. He begins by complimenting them for their support of the free market: You also affirm something the left goes out […]

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Enslaving our kids

I’m late to the party on this, but I couldn’t let Thomas Ricks’ stupid op-ed go without saying something. Ricks is a respected journalist who covers military issues and has a blog at Foreign Policy magazine. I’ve read a couple of his books — Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq and Making the Corps […]

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Peter McWilliams and why the drug war isn’t funny

The name of this blog is more or less a reference to the book Ain’t Nobody’s Business If You Do: The Absurdity of Consensual Crimes in Our Free Country by Peter McWilliams. That book advances a simple but profound premise: It’s a bad idea to define an activity as a crime unless it causes harm […]

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How not to help the homeless

One of the common slurs against libertarianism is that we want poor people to suffer. Sure, we claim to be driven by principled opposition to the leviathan of government, but these critics see through that. They know that in our hearts, libertarians oppose wasteful social programs because we hate poor people. To be fair, that’s […]

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Do elected leaders worry about precedent?

Whenever our elected leaders decide to give themselves some shiny new powers — indefinite detention, warrentless wiretaps, killing Americans without due process — I always wonder, don’t they realize that when the other side wins control, they’ll have those powers too? Maybe Republicans trusted Bush with the powers of the Patriot Act, but didn’t they […]

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Remy: Why They Fought

Not quite appropriate for Memorial Day. Not quite inappropriate. It came up first in YouTube’s search box autocomplete after I typed “re” so I guess I’m not the only one who thought of this today.

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Shikha Dalmia on totalitarianism at the borders

Since I don’t have time to write much of my own stuff, I can at least point to something good when I see it, such as Shikha Dalmia’s piece at The Daily about how both the left and right hate it when people cross the border: If there was ever any doubt that the totalitarian […]

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The FBI thinks you should never have privacy

Can you imagine if the FBI had been around when the construction industry was as new as the internet is? We would have been reading news items like this: The FBI is asking for industry support for new legislation that would require construction contractors to keep copies of the keys to all locks they install […]

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When libertarianism happens to people: Music shop edition

It’s a bit unfortunate for libertarianism and free markets that Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (soon to be another major motion picture) is about innovative captains of industry — giants among insects — beset on all sides by the leviathan of government. For one thing, it encourages too much respect for business leaders, many of whom […]

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Helping the well-connected by helping the disadvantaged

A family friend used to be an executive at a Fortune 500 corporation, where she ran a department that provided a certain kind of service to other businesses. She had started the department with just a handful of people and quickly grown it to occupy a whole floor of a downtown skyscraper. Then, about a […]

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How not to bring women into the libertarian movement

Over at Ravings of a Feral Genius, the whole contraception-Sandra-Fluke-Rush-Limbaugh-slut-prostitute incident has got Jennifer Able pissed off at some of her fellow libertarian bloggers (emphasis, I suspect, on “fellow”): Limbaugh’s rant didn’t surprise me at all. Here’s what did surprise me: when I’d go on Facebook, or visit various political blogs and forums I’m prone […]

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Don’t let Whitney Houston become the next Len Bias

To sports fans, Len Bias was a college basketball star who died too young of a drug overdose, a symbol of what might have been. To those of us who oppose the War on Drugs, however, Len Bias is a symbol that was exploited and abused by posturing politicians, resulting in the passage of the […]

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