[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]
As of this date, 340 people have signed the Petition to Abolish the Government of the USA. I’ll re-post the link from time to time in to get more signers.
Archive | June, 2008
No Direction Home
[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]
Latest news on Atlas Shrugged’s bumpy, seemingly interminable road to moviehood.
A Note on the Treatment of Libertarians in Intellectual History
I found this fragment in some undated notes I was making for a blog post. I now have no idea for what context the following remarks were intended, so I thought I’d put them up on their own:
Say is made a disciple of Smith, and Hodgskin a disciple of Ricardo, though each was an independent thinker and quite critical of his supposed mentor. Spencer is dubbed a “Social Darwinist,” despite anticipating Darwin by several years. Bastiat is called a mere populariser, his original contributions overlooked; the individualist anarchists are treated as mere footnotes to Stirner, despite the fact that most of them (even Tucker) formed their views independently of Stirner. Rand is dismissed as a vulgariser of Nietzsche, while Rothbard, in a chronological reversal, has been described as a follower of Nozick.
Immanuel Kant’s Howdy Duty Show
Actually this has nothing to do with Kant, it’s just a grab bag of random stuff:
Hurray for the Belgians! Not only did they pioneer market anarchism (with Molinari and de Puydt), but they also pioneered the internet. (Conical hat tip to LRC.)
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Channel: an enjoyable piece (and how many American politicians could write so well?), but a bad analogy: choosing whether to impose a constraint on oneself and choosing whether to impose a constraint on others are not liberty/security trade-offs in anything close to the same sense.
Farther north, left-libertarian science-fiction writer Ken MacLeod points out a few problems with Christopher Hitchens’ atheist manifesto.
And on this side of the Atlantic: the joys of bureaucracy.
Also take a look at the percentage of the united states that is subject to federal land monopoly.
Finally, two items about the skewed perceptions of the Associated Press: first, they think they have the authority to make IP restrictions even tighter than the government’s; second, they think a species isn’t extinct when biologists say so; it’s only extinct when bureaucrats say so. (So the AP hierarchy is: science; above that, the state; above that, the AP.)
Subversive Signage
Anyone who’s planning to protest the Democratic and/or Republican conventions and is looking for a poster slogan is welcome to this one:
Or a talkier one, if you prefer:
Of course we’re against all government, not just the presidency; but this might be an interesting conversation-starter (and, to borrow a beloved phrase of the gun-control crowd, a “reasonable first step”). And if people ask you “But without a president, who would run the country?” the very fact that people say things like that is yet another argument for abolishing the presidency.
Sudha Shenoy R.I.P.
[cross-posted at Liberty & Power and Mises Blog]
I was very sad to learn of Sudha Shenoy’s death [see here and here]. I didn’t know her well, but we spoke a few times at Mises Institute events (or on the Atlanta airport shuttle) and interacted on the L&P blog. She was a terrific economic historian, a radical libertarian, an inexhaustible fount of information (ask her a question and she would reply with a meticulous bibliography), with a witty and incisive mind disinclined to let b.s. pass unscathed.
In particular, I owe to Sudha the two following bits of information about her mentor Hayek:
1. Late in life Hayek once said that if he were younger, he would be a free-market anarchist.
2. Trusting Hayek’s notoriously unreliable memory, most writers have taken at face value his claim that he was never Mises’ student in the official sense, i.e., never enrolled in his university courses. But Sudha pointed out to me that Hayek’s grade book (reproduced on p. 13 of John Raybould’s Hayek: A Commemorative Album) bears the signatures of his professors, including Mises.