Kym Robinson | The Libertarian Institute

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...

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...

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