Kym Robinson | The Libertarian Institute

Joe Louis vs. the Tax Man

by Kym Robinson | Mar 7, 2023 | Featured Articles

Professional fighters are accustomed to pain, not just from the blows of an opponent or the deceptions of poor management and shoddy promoters, but the tax man who often deals out the most punishment. Boxing legend and American hero Joe Louis, who helped symbolize the era of the Greatest Generation, met his most fearsome opponent in the U.S. Bureau of Internal Revenue (precusor to today's IRS). Despite symbolically winning his rematch against German boxer Max Schmelling, the icon of Nazi Germany, or his prior victory over Primo Carnera from Mussolini’s Italy, Louis would become bludgeoned by...

The Synthetic Killers of Tomorrow’s Tyranny

by Kym Robinson | Feb 8, 2023 | Featured Articles

When Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was deposed in 1989, it is claimed that he pleaded for Jack Ramsay, a character Tom Selleck played in the 1984 Michael Crichton film, Runaway. The dictator was a fan of the film and in his desperation during the show trial may have been convinced that the film's protagonist, a police officer who tracks down rogue robots and protected the innocent from out of control technology, would rescue him. Jack Ramsay (or Tom Selleck, for that matter) did not rescue the dictator and his wife. Instead they were both executed by the very soldiers who had...

They Smile and Shrug Their Shoulders at the Murder of a Man

by Kym Robinson | Feb 1, 2023 | Criminal Justice, Featured Articles

Recently, many of us digitally witnessed five armed police officers beat Tyre Nichols to death. Oftentimes it’s easy for us to be voyeurs to violence and then conjure up a context or make an excuse for what it is that we are seeing. It’s the privilege of distance and an inhuman disconnect from what we are seeing. When five men beat another to death, the common revulsion of what we are seeing usually ignites a moral understanding of right and wrong, a sense of fair play, empathy for the victim and a rejection of any context where five men can brutally beat another to death. When you introduce...

Our Naked Society

by Kym Robinson | Jan 23, 2023 | Featured Articles

In his 1964 book The Naked Society, Vance Packard challenged the ever increasing loss of privacy as technology and large institutions began wide spread surveillance that today has become acceptable. At the time, computer power, hidden cameras, and concealed microphones were crude gadgets compared to the technology currently in use. The intrusion into a person's life then was nothing compared to what is acceptable today. With each generation we become comfortable and more obliging to the fact that we no longer are allowed privacy. We have all been stripped naked. A subcommittee in the U.S....

Some Aussie Songs Against the Wars

by Kym Robinson | Dec 14, 2022 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

Music can be powerful, possessing the ability to conjure emotion in a few minutes what an essay never could. Australia has a rich history of talented singers, writers, and performers creating music that is unique to the sunburned continent. Australia also has a rebel culture, hidden in plain sight. Founded by reluctant prisoners, enthusiastic adventurers, and those escaping their birth land to call Aboriginal land their home, with a history of empire and defiance, the music can reflect this combination, none more than in the songs against war. Few songs express the sorrow felt by soldiers...

All Quiet on the Western Front (2022)

by Kym Robinson | Nov 16, 2022 | Featured Articles

The latest adaption of All Quiet on the Western Front is a German production available on Netflix that gives a grim and gruesome depiction of World War I. Based on the 1929 book by Erich Maria Remarque, and differing in parts from both the book and previous film adaptations, it stands on its own and respects the source material. A sobering account of war and the tragedy of state violence, the film's perspective is very much anti-war as human characters are treated as inhuman elements in the harsh setting of the Western Front. Set in 1917, the film focuses on two German soldiers, Paul and...

Liberty Beyond Borders

by Kym Robinson | Nov 3, 2022 | Featured Articles, Libertarianism

Awareness and conversation about liberty is flourishing, some of it a little more focused on particular messaging than others. Most are fixated on the United States, whether as a criticism of the empire and its wars or a romantic aspiration of converting the nation into a republic of virtue. All nations hold dear a certain mythology that generates pride and loyalty. The natural bias towards the local and familiar that can stir pride and inspiration. Such a bias is also a crucial ingredient for imperialism or any other of the nasty “isms." With the current change of power inside the U.S....

‘Fletch’ Lives in the Courageous Pen of Reporters

by Kym Robinson | Oct 17, 2022 | Book Reviews, Featured Articles

“I must follow the journalistic instinct of being skeptical of everything until I personally have proved it true.”- Irwin Fletcher In the post-Watergate world, fiction was full of lone wolf reporters, the courageous typewriter and camera that pointed where it was unwelcome. When author Gregory McDonald wrote his first “Fletch” novel in 1974 about reporter and former marine Iriwn M. Fletcher (AKA "Fletch" or "Jane Doe"), it would develop into a series of books, two movies starring Chevy Chase, and a remake to be released this year. In the first book and movie, a world of police corruption is...