How do you avoid this kind of nightmare scenario?
The Dallas Police Chief’s only answer was “to hire people with common sense and good people skills.”
No. The answer is to restore equality of rights between police officers and ordinary people. As long as one group of people has rights another group doesn’t, there’s no way to ensure reliable safeguards against the first group’s abusive treatment of the second.
I never blogged about my trip to San Diego two months ago, but I did take lots of photos with my new digital camera. You can see them here. (Warning: unless you have a spiffy-fast connection these pages take a long time to load.)
You can also see a pic from my trip to New Orleans last spring (I’m at the New Orleans Zoo) that a friend made into a birthday card to me – here. (And yes, the sign really said that.)
Check out Kevin Carson’s latest C4SS editorial, Cost-Plus Markup and Mandatory Overhead, for yet another example of how legislation supposedly designed to protect the little guy from predatory big business in fact does just the opposite.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Veteran libertarian activist and internet news publisher becomes second C4SS paid staff member.
AUBURN, ALABAMA – March 20, 2009 – Center for a Stateless Society – Prominent libertarian activist and news publisher Thomas Knapp has joined the Center for a Stateless Society as the Center’s second paid part-time staff member. In his role as News Analyst beginning April 1st, 2009, Knapp will be producing one or more op-ed pieces per week as well as mentoring volunteer contributing writers.
Knapp has long been associated with “the libertarian wing of the Libertarian Party” and is the founder of its breakaway ultra-faction, the Boston Tea Party. As well as being a prolific blogger on the side, Knapp brings over a decades experience with online news writing, editing, publishing and team leadership; first for the former Free-Market.Net and later for his own publication, Rational Review. He is author of the e-book “Writing the Libertarian Op-Ed,” among other works.
C4SS Director Brad Spangler said of the move “Knapp was the logical choice for the position. His continuing editorship of Rational Review News Digest immerses him in the news cycle so thoroughly that it can only be likened to a fish in water. This is the man who produces the daily crib notes for an entire eco-system of libertarian online content producers. His wealth of experience means he is uniquely suited to explain to the general public how libertarian principles, consistently applied, reach beyond the inconsistent market liberalism of figures like U.S. Congressman Ron Paul into full-blown market anarchism. We’re very pleased to announce Tom is joining the Center.”
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ORGANIZATIONAL SUMMARY
The mission of the Molinari Institute is to promote understanding of the philosophy of Market Anarchism as a sane, consensual alternative to the hypertrophic violence of the State. The Institute takes its name from Gustave de Molinari (1819-1912), originator of the theory of Market Anarchism. The Center for a Stateless Society is the Molinari Institute’s media center.
CONTACT
Brad Spangler
Center for a Stateless Society
media@c4ss.org
http://www.c4ss.org
I just saw an ad for a 1999 production of David Copperfield (the Dickens waif, not the stage magician or the anarcho-syndicalist assassin – oops, you’re not supposed to know about the anarcho-syndicalist assassin), starring a very young Daniel Radcliffe. I was amused to see Maggie Smith (Prof. McGonagall) as David’s Aunt and Imelda Staunton (Dolores Umbridge) as Mrs. Micawber. Making the Potter movies must have felt like a reunion.
There’s a famous story about Fred Smith at Yale submitting for class a business plan for what would one day be Federal Express, and getting it back with a C and a comment from the professor: “The concept is interesting and well-formed, but in order to earn better than a ‘C’, the idea must be feasible.”
That’s such a delightful story that it really ought to be true; but here’s what Smith himself says about it:
The first phase really started when I was an undergraduate at Yale in 1965. I wrote a term paper for an economics class in which I simply observed that as society became more automated, companies like IBM and Xerox that sold early computer devices needed to make sure that their products were dependable. … How do you get your computer parts quickly when your system goes down? You couldn’t depend on the post office. I believed you’d need a faster, more dependable, and more far-reaching kind of delivery system. That’s what the paper was about; it was not a full-blown business plan.
Today that paper is kind of famous, and it’s because of a careless comment I once made. I was asked what grade I got on it, and I stupidly said, ‘I guess I got my usual gentlemanly C.’ That stuck, and it’s become a well-know story because everybody likes to flout authority. But to be honest, I don’t really remember what grade I got it. I probably didn’t get a very good one, though, because it wasn’t a well-thought-out paper.
From which I infer that the famous quotation (never attributed to any professor by name) is, alas, inauthentic.
