Friday, December 29, 2006
High-Yield Farmers Are Saving Wildlife
"Producing the world’s current agricultural output organically would require several times as much land as is currently cultivated. There wouldn’t be much room left for the rainforest.”
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Thursday, December 28, 2006
Society without a State
In Rothbard's view, "the anarchist society is one which maximizes the tendencies for the good and the cooperative, while it minimizes both the opportunity and the moral legitimacy of the evil and the criminal. If the anarchist view is correct and the state is indeed the great legalized and socially legitimated channel for all manner of antisocial crime – theft, oppression, mass murder – on a massive scale, then surely the abolition of such an engine of crime can do nothing but favor the good in man and discourage the bad."
"Enough [is] said here...to indicate that an anarchist system for settling disputes would be both viable and self-subsistent: that once adopted, it could work and continue indefinitely. How to arrive at that system is of course a very different problem, but certainly at the very least it will not likely come about unless people are convinced of its workability, are convinced, in short, that the state is not a necessary evil."
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"Enough [is] said here...to indicate that an anarchist system for settling disputes would be both viable and self-subsistent: that once adopted, it could work and continue indefinitely. How to arrive at that system is of course a very different problem, but certainly at the very least it will not likely come about unless people are convinced of its workability, are convinced, in short, that the state is not a necessary evil."
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Duke and the Politics of Rape
The Cultural Revolution of the 1960s urged individuals to give up their "sexual inhibitions" and to enter into sexual relations with each other on a basis of mutual pleasure – and nothing else. Sex was not to be an apparatus by which couples strengthened the whole of their relationship, but rather something that stood on its own.
Now, men did not need to be encouraged to follow such a sexual viewpoint, but the effect upon women was greater. Whatever one might think of calls for feminine modesty and the like, the zeitgeist of the Sexual Revolution was that women should have the same sexual habits as men. That such a way of thinking would run into reality should not surprise anyone, but any person who objected by saying that such a loose standard of sexuality would demean women was accused of…demeaning women.
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Now, men did not need to be encouraged to follow such a sexual viewpoint, but the effect upon women was greater. Whatever one might think of calls for feminine modesty and the like, the zeitgeist of the Sexual Revolution was that women should have the same sexual habits as men. That such a way of thinking would run into reality should not surprise anyone, but any person who objected by saying that such a loose standard of sexuality would demean women was accused of…demeaning women.
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A Mission for Further Economic Ruin
How did we come to be having trouble exporting our own cheap crap, while all the good stuff seems to be made overseas – the dead reverse of the way things were in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when "made in America" was the call-sign of quality, and hardly anyone overseas could compete with the high-tech efficiency and productivity made possible by America's unrivaled encouragement of those with a gift for accruing and investing entrepreneurial capital?
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There’s a Bureaucrat in Your Trash
Hopkinton has mandatory curbside recycling. But the town government still worries that you might be throwing away things that you should be placing into that oh-so-earth-friendly green bin. So to address this pressing issue, they have commissioned the Hopkinton Recycling Officer to pick through your trash, just to make sure you’re on the straight and narrow. What’s the problem with that? You don’t have anything to hide, now do you?
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Monday, December 25, 2006
Ballot Box Folklore: Reflections on the myth of the majority
That the ballot box contains a bona fide expression of the will of the people is a myth as fantastic as any attributed to the ancients in a more innocent age. It is a myth comparable to the genie in the bottle offering the liberator three fantastic wishes. But this myth is a key feature of an outrageous hoax perpetrated on a deluded people by clever opportunists ambitious for power over them.
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The State Is Worse Than Worthless
It is clear that the world’s system of states does not have a method of policing genocides, despite the fact that the states claim to be in the business of protecting citizens. Each gang (state) more or less respects the turf of the other gangs. In this way, each gang holds on to its power – the most important aim of the gang.
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No Room at the Inn, The Economic Lessons of Bethlehem
At the heart of the Christmas story rests some important lessons concerning free enterprise, government, and the role of wealth in society.
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Saturday, December 23, 2006
Law-Enforcement Socialism
Outside of some small academic and activist circles, most Americans reject the radical ideology of socialism as it pertains to the economy as a whole. Hardly anyone believes that the state should maintain the means of production and that private enterprise should be abolished. Most people understand the folly of divorcing all industry from private property ownership and running an economic sector completely through central management.
It is interesting, then, that most people still believe in total socialism when in comes to providing services of security and justice.
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It is interesting, then, that most people still believe in total socialism when in comes to providing services of security and justice.
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Just Say No to (Corporate) Welfare
Here’s what farmer John Phipps has to say about the subsidies: “My government is basically saying I am incompetent and need help.” Phipps got $120,000 in subsidies despite the fact that he grossed nearly $500,000, putting his farm in the nation’s top 3 percent.
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now we're wondering if we didn't create a monster
I speak for the collective: We had to figure out ways to tone down our natural skepticism in order to put on a united face. We knew it would mean pushing the science harder than it should be. Now we're wondering if they realize how uncertain our projections of future climate are.
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Friday, December 22, 2006
One Flu Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Why not spend available resources on saving people from those deadly diseases that are taking lives right now rather than on over-preparation for a hypothetical epidemic that is highly uncertain?
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Thursday, December 21, 2006
Ozone and Radon: The Real Story
Who is held responsible for lying to the public? The answer is, nobody is ever held responsible for such lies.
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Renewable Electricity 'Creating' Jobs, Destroying Wealth
It is easy to invent policies that create lots of jobs--just make delivery trucks illegal and create work for human porters. Hire people to shatter windows in homes and businesses, and you will create a boon in the glass-making industry. However, it wastes the skills and services of a labor force that could have produced things that people really wanted.
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Report Critiques Net Neutrality Assumptions
If content providers are willing to pay for enhanced quality, there is no good reason for regulators to deter them.
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Beyond Taxes and Regulation
Policymakers should rise above the net neutrality debate and focus on what America truly requires from the Internet: getting affordable broadband access to those who need it.
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Sports arena schemes socialize costs and privatize profits
No taxpayer is safe if a Task Force is meeting somewhere. If a new arena would be such a money-maker, some developer is likely on the verge of putting one up, post haste, to reap the benefits, right? Well, no. A task force determined that taxpayers would have to foot some of the money to make a new arena building a reality. Plus, the $405 million price tag doesn’t include land, infrastructure or parking.
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Wednesday, December 20, 2006
Most religions, at some point, have been spread by the sword
We ignore, at our peril, the quiet revulsion felt by ordinary Muslims who don’t express their feelings with beheadings and car bombs.
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Statism, Post-Modernism, and the Death of the Western World
America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without creating a civilization in-between.
– Oscar Wilde
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– Oscar Wilde
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Is the dangerous claptrap of "Left Behind" all there is?
When was the last time in recent history that Christians have made a large scale contribution to the culture at large? Historically, Christians contributed significantly in many areas of scientific advancement, the humanities, and literature. In terms of Evangelical Protestantism our most recent significant pop-culture contribution appears to be the fictional Left Behind novels. Unfortunately, its pop theology is rather dubious to say the least and the practical implications that flow from it are the exact opposite of cultural progress. Rather than progress, this type of popular Christian fiction leads to paranoia, militarism, and escapism. It seems that in the quest for cultural advancement, many Christians are being, well, left behind.
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The high priests of climate change are trampling dissent
The debate about the science of global warming has been taken over by the politicians and their placemen. There are many attempts to suppress dissenting voices. This is appalling. Since when has science proceeded by enforced consensus, other than when controlled by the church or state? Too often the dissenters have proved right.
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What next?
"despite all of the dire warnings about our increased intake of trans-fats over the last 20 years, heart disease in America has been in swift decline ... So, if they're killing us, they're not doing a very good job."
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Tuesday, December 19, 2006
Stifling debate by intimidation
"One would think [that] 500 years after Copernicus and 400 years after Galileo, western governments would understand the tremendous societal damage that can be done when government attempts to intimidate and stifle scientific research and debate."
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The Global Alarmist Inquisition
Snowe and Rockefeller imply that speech about global warming and climate policy is illegitimate unless conducted within the pages of scientific journals such as Science or Nature, or unless it uncritically parrots the editorial policies of such journals.
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Politics Is Anti-Truth
It's not that truth cannot be discovered, or isn’t already known. Rather, it seems obvious that truth, if known, is disregarded if inconvenient. It doesn’t matter.
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How to garner attention for your latest social study
Did you know that grieving for your loved ones costs U.S. employers $37.6 billion a year? Of course, that’s only for human loved ones; grieving for non-humans (i.e., pets) costs us an additional $2.4 billion a year. March Madness – that’s basketball March Madness not some obscure disease for hat makers – costs us $3.8 billion annually and Sick-Building Syndrome another $15 billion. Obesity? $21.7 billion a year. But that’s just in California.
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Raskin?s Wager
In Washington higher taxes are always the solution
As many others have done, Virginia's Democratic Senator-elect Jim Webb recently complained of an "ever-widening divide" in America, claiming "the top 1% now takes in an astounding 16% of national income, up from 8% in 1980". Those same figures have been repeatedly echoed in all major newspapers. Yet the statement is clearly false.
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Monday, December 18, 2006
Diversity, Yes; Force, No
Prior to the first federal minimum wage bill passed on the 1930s, there was virtually no difference between black and white teenage (i.e., unskilled) unemployment, at a time when many assume that racism was more prevalent than today. After the minimum age bill is passed, however, we see an increase in black teenage unemployment relative to whites, since as employers are now forced to pay a wage that is higher than the value of many workers' marginal revenue product, they no longer incur a market penalty for allowing racism to dictate their market decisions.
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Losing It
Unless you stipulate that the behavior of all those climate models is wrong, you are forced to conclude that future warming will be modest and there really isn't anything you can do about it. Anyone who refuses to acknowledge this is in denial, which, of course, explains the frustration and hyperbole of the mob, now calling for assault and murder.
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The Gore Who Stole Christmas
Though the debate is highly politicized and emotionally charged, good science is beginning to drive out bad. A sampling of recent issues of Science, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, shows that peer-reviewed studies dispute virtually all the tenets behind climate alarmism.
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Withdrawal From Iraq Now Will Be Less Painful Than Years From Now
Except when the survival of the nation is at stake, all military missions must be judged according to a cost-benefit calculation. Iraq has never come close to being a war for America's survival. It was an elective war -- a war of choice, and a bad choice at that.
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A Nation Worlds Apart
What liberals are screaming about now regarding an American military-based imperialism that is forcing an American democracy on a sovereign nation is the reason why Southerners remember the Civil War 141 years later. American imperialism began when the blue uniforms crossed the Mason-Dixon.
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Sunday, December 17, 2006
The Nonviolent Eucharist
‘Suppose someone gave a war and the Christians refused to kill or harm one another’
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Pro-Life Killers
The estimates of the number of Iraqi dead range from a “low” of 30,000, provided by President Bush, to a high of 650,000, provided by researchers at Johns Hopkins University.
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Thursday, December 14, 2006
Lou Dobbs Thinks You're a Fool
Dobbs manages to say that he supports American individualism, individual rights, capitalism, free markets, and a good work ethic, but that these must be upheld by policies of price and wage controls, corporate taxes, subsidies, government control of education, protectionist tariffs and trade agreements, and mass democracy.
Huh?
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Huh?
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Wednesday, December 13, 2006
The Dupes Of Hazard
King Canute is said to be the poster child for futility, sitting on the seashore, as the legend goes, commanding that the waves retreat.
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Global Warming and The Emergent Ignorant Class
Ordinarily, this wouldn’t bother me. I really do not care that most people routinely substitute emotion for data and don’t know the difference. However, when their stupidity reaches the point that it begins to affect my personal freedom, then I have to act
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Why the State Loves War
For a minority ruling group that's coercively siphoning off resources and lowering the take-home pay and living standards of the majority of the population, war, argues Salerno, has the advantage of directing the attention of the majority to an outside enemy, a foreign state, a foreign ideology.
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Jefferson Davis Was Right
Jefferson Davis, one of America's greatest statesmen, said that a question settled by violence would inevitably arise again, though at a different time and in a different form.
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Second Amendment Lessons From Iraq
What Americans mistakenly do is transfer their beliefs regarding distrust of government onto others. The vast majority of people around this world believe government to be a good, not evil, force in their lives." Well put. Even a well-armed populace can be oppressed if it doesn’t have the will to rebel. I might add that even in the United States, detractors of the Second Amendment, and even many of its supporters, tend to trust government too much and see it as a force for good as long as their side is in power.
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'Sock It to the Left!': The Rise of the Spite Right
Ann Coulter, for example, cracks that if "liberal" jurists "interpreted the Second Amendment the way they interpret the First Amendment, we'd have a right to bear nuclear arms by now." And what exactly does that deserve – other than a rim shot? This: If conservatives "interpreted the Second Amendment the way they interpret the First Amendment," even the National Guard wouldn't have guns.
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More Deaths by Government
Dr. Ruwart estimates 4.7 million people have died in the last 40 years, while waiting for FDA approval. Nor would it do to leave out the statist banning of DDT, which greatly increased malaria deaths.
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An Extreme Threat to Liberty – Centrism
The electoral process has somehow made it so that no matter how much centrist policies devastate the American economy and the freedom of its people, the problems can be blamed on partisanship and the recommended solution is always more compromise. The danger is ever-increasing despotism and fiscal recklessness in the name of centrism.
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Tuesday, December 12, 2006
Benefit Consumers: End Cable Monopolies
From the time cable lines began replacing TV antennas four decades ago, municipalities have required cable firms to obtain franchises under the assumption that cable service was a “natural monopoly” in need of taming. This local regulation, which was never justified, has become destructive now that there are assorted technologies and service providers that consumers could choose from if given the chance.
Evidence abounds that franchising by cities and townships costs consumers.
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Evidence abounds that franchising by cities and townships costs consumers.
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Inflation: A Moral Problem
Inflation is the depreciation of a currency’s purchasing power. This once occurred through governments debasing their currencies – such as mixing bronze into gold coinage – to artificially reduce their debts or fund increased spending. When such policies were implemented by the sixteenth-century Spanish monarchy, they were condemned as fraud by Spanish theologians.
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The Evil of Swedish Labor Unions
Can anybody truly say that the unions are always on the side of the common man?
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'Consumerism' is Not a Four-Letter Word
If my grandchild is desperately sick, I want to get her to a doctor. The urgent care clinic is open late, as is the drugstore next door, and thank goodness. I'm in and out, and I have the medicine and materials necessary to restore her to health. No one would say that this is a superficial demand.
But it can only stay open late because its offices are nestled in a strip mall where the rents are low and the access is high. The real estate is shared by candy stores, sports shops selling scuba gear, a billiard hall and a store that specializes in party favors – all stores selling "superficial" things. All pay rent. The developer who made the mall wouldn't have built the place were it not for these less urgent needs.
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But it can only stay open late because its offices are nestled in a strip mall where the rents are low and the access is high. The real estate is shared by candy stores, sports shops selling scuba gear, a billiard hall and a store that specializes in party favors – all stores selling "superficial" things. All pay rent. The developer who made the mall wouldn't have built the place were it not for these less urgent needs.
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Rush Limbaugh Crosses the Line
Rush Limbaugh has finally crossed the line that should be visible to all Americans, especially Southerners. He is no friend of freedom, liberty, the Constitution or the Bill of Rights! He is fan of tyrants, and a lover of despotism, and should be treated as such.
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America’s Injustice System Is Criminal
According to the International Center for Prison Studies at King’s College in London, the US has 700,000 more of its citizens incarcerated than China, a country with a population four to five times larger than that of the US, and 1,330,000 more people in prison than crime-ridden Russia. The US has 5% of the world’s population and 25% of the world’s prisoners. The American incarceration rate is seven times higher than that of European countries. Either America is the land of criminals, or something is seriously wrong with the criminal justice (sic) system in "the land of the free."
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Friday, December 08, 2006
Sowing the Seeds
The folly of politicians is that they think that the powers and institutions that they implement won't be abused by their rivals. Case in point, the public school system and various regulatory bodies.
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Imperialism and the Logic of War Making
Commentaries on war stretching back more than two millennia to the Peloponnesian Wars have enshrouded the fundamental causes of war in an impenetrable fog of myths, fallacies, and outright lies. War is generally portrayed as the inevitable outcome of either complex historical forces or accidental circumstances, rather than politicians playing God.
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A Young Marine Speaks Out
Finally someone who can speak with credibility on this subject - no armchair computer commando is he. With one year in Iraq under his belt, over 180 patrols and facing redeployment in the near future to Iraq, this articulate Marine lays out why we shouldn't be there and how this doesn't have anything to do with "protecting America or "freedom."
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Newsweek's Voodoo 'Gospel'
"Lincoln may have been an atheist, but he fully understood that most Americans were certainly not, that they read the Bible, and that their emotions could be rather easily swayed by references to the Bible, especially at wartime when emotion seems to overwhelm reason on the part of much of the population."DiLorenzo exposing more of the real Lincoln
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Smoking Bans Are Dangerous to a Free Society's Health
Free societies allow people to make decisions that others don't like. That includes allowing smokers to have bars and restaurants to cater to their preferences, just as nonsmokers should have establishments that cater to theirs. We shouldn't force smokers to live by the preference of some non-smokers any more than the reverse.
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Monday, December 04, 2006
Wm. L. Anderson: Systematic Corruption Pervades America's Judicial System
Parents of Duke lacrosse players (who were not indicted) emailed him: "To a person, they have said that before this case began, they had believed that the players in the criminal justice system basically were honest and above board." They have come to understand that "prosecutors and the police are more likely to lie than to tell the truth."
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