Kym Robinson | The Libertarian Institute

Goldfish in Chief

by Kym Robinson | Sep 19, 2023 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

Former U.S. President Barack Obama recently put out a tweet with a link to organizations that may be of some help to the people of Libya due to recent floods. NATO was absent from the list. Whoever runs the former president's social media is likely unaware why some responded with sarcasm or dismay that the former commander in chief who presided over the intervention that caused the ruination of Libya would post such a token tweet. That is, after all, the nature of politics: a distinct disconnect from outcomes and consequences by those who lie, cheat, and charm their way to the top of the...

The COVID Times

by Kym Robinson | Sep 11, 2023 | Featured Articles

“I never wanted it, I didn’t need it. I just gave in, it’s my biggest regret." The words of an Australian man in his mid-thirties who spent most of the "COVID years” active on social media challenging the narrative. Referring to the vaccination as the “clot shot," he knew other men who had suffered injury from the vaccinations. Despite his hesitancy and lack of fear for the COVID-19 virus itself, he succumbed. That is how many Australians were motivated to roll up their sleeves. With a rabid media campaign, a government that bullied and restricted life, and a community of familiars and...

The Prussian Nights of War

by Kym Robinson | Aug 31, 2023 | Featured Articles

It’s not been burned, just looted, rifled. A moaning, by the walls half muffled: The mother’s wounded, still alive. The little daughter’s on the mattress, Dead. How many have been on it? A platoon, a company perhaps? A girl’s been turned into a woman, A woman turned into a corpse. It all comes down to simple phrases: Do Not Forget! Do Not Forgive! Blood for Blood! A Tooth for a Tooth! The mother begs, Tote mich, Soldat! - Prussian Nights, Captain Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Soviet Red Army, World War II “Things happen in war," we are often told. It is a blanket that drapes across atrocities, and...

Biographies of Empire

by Kym Robinson | Aug 16, 2023 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

Many books have been written about the rise and fall of great powers. Authors after the fact speculate on what went wrong and how the decline started, while those contemporary writers during the ascendance promise a future of brilliance and endless prosperity. For every Edward Gibbon who looks back fondly on empire and diagnoses blame to alien infections, there are those who imagine the future glory of a thousand year Reich. In our own time we are witnessing the decline of a mono-polar moment of a solely American dominated international order, perhaps returning to the tradition of competing...

The Fluid Morality of Statism

by Kym Robinson | Aug 8, 2023 | Featured Articles, Libertarianism

For anyone who has been forced to justify their beliefs when it comes to individual liberty, we are often placed onto the back foot in the defense of the imaginary. The what if? emerges as an ideological assault that somehow is expected to prove the supremacy of the status quo and reveal the failure of liberty. Yet, when the basic concepts of statism are questioned, very seldom do we find a satisfactory validation outside of the "greater good" or human evils needing to be regulated by angels. The argumentation for most ideologies, especially the government-centric, is a sense of morality. It...

The Legacy of Cluster Bombs

by Kym Robinson | Jul 12, 2023 | Featured Articles

A decade ago I attended a charity event dedicated to children from all over the world that had experienced horrible things. There was a little girl, around 11, who had lost both of her legs and her eight year old brother. International doctors had managed to save her life and perhaps in time, with the assistance of prosthetics, she will walk again. But nothing will bring her brother back. She and her brother were from Laos. One afternoon they were outside playing when an explosive that had been dropped by the United States government, years before her parents were born, detonated. While the...

Libertarianism Should Not Be Hostile to Women’s Liberation

by Kym Robinson | May 4, 2023 | Featured Articles, Libertarianism

A young college woman is raped by a man. No justice is found because the rapist is an otherwise “promising young man” with a future ahead of him. His victim is merely a blip on his sterling professional conduct. Those who witnessed or were aware of the rape pretend as though it never happened. This is the catalyst for the plot of the movie, Promising Young Woman. The victim commits suicide and her friend seeks revenge. The film’s title is a play on the phrasing used anytime some young men are accused of rape, as though masculine potential is an important assessment of worth when weighed up...

A Frightful Australia Must Emerge from Under the Yank’s Skirt

by Kym Robinson | Apr 13, 2023 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

The Frightened County is what Alan Renouf, one of Australia’s most prominent public servants, called Australia in his 1979 book of the same title. Renouf’s book is a delicate balance of criticizing past Australian alliances and military adventures while also embracing a future that would lead to much of the same. Renouf called for an independent Australia, but one that remains close to the United States. “She [Australia] fights for the same values as the U.S., that she is Western civilisation’s outpost there [Asia], that economically she is important to the West," he wrote. Australia...