Kym Robinson | The Libertarian Institute

An Indictment of ‘Public Health’

by Kym Robinson | Mar 16, 2022 | Featured Articles

We live in an age of public health. Even in countries with private sector health care, government regulates and steers the practice of medicine. On the surface this may seem a positive. In theory it's an established framework to protect the patient and practitioners from injury and risks. It exists to coordinate in times of widespread crisis and can act as an impartial entity to protect those who are vulnerable. It can also act as the moral heart of a nation, determining the ethics and values in such a manner to guide those who are at times pragmatic or emotionally exposed when decisions...

Warmongers Against Putin’s War

by Kym Robinson | Mar 8, 2022 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

Revulsion to war is inconsistent for some. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has brought critics of this particular war to the antiwar movement, though they likely will return to their pro-war instincts when current headlines fade. For now, in the West, Vladimir Putin has been labelled as the next Adolf Hitler. Ironically Hitler was a product of the West and led a terrible invasion of Russia (a memory that lingers and moulds present day Russian foreign policy). Twenty years ago Saddam Hussein was the next Hitler. Colonel Qaddafi, Slobodan Milosevic, Mahmoud Ahmanddinejad and so on were all...

Remembering the Men Who Avoided Nuclear Apocolypse

by Kym Robinson | Mar 1, 2022 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

The 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis is remembered for its frightful brinkmanship, when the United States and Soviet Union danced close to the furnace of global destruction. Fortunately cooler heads prevailed and a war of the worst kind was averted. One such cool head was Soviet naval officer Vasili Aleksandrovich Arkhipov, who was aboard a submarine at the height of the crisis. The nuclear torpedo armed submarine he was a crew member of came under depth charge attack from the U.S. Navy. Soviet doctrine at the time determined that if such a submarine came under attack, three officers needed to...

Reinhard Heydrich: Nazi Hero, Moral Monster

by Kym Robinson | Jan 26, 2022 | Featured Articles

Martyr of the State Known as “The Butcher of Prague,” Reinhard Heydrich was for the government of Nazi Germany an accomplished senior figure. He had the preferred look that many racialists enjoyed, clean cut and Germanic. A man that Adolf Hitler had described as having an “Iron Heart." For many of the monumental events in the history of the Nazi government, Heydrich had helped organize or participated in them. From the 1936 Berlin Olympics to the Kristallnacht persecutions, he was a crucial element of the prewar government and its growth. Heydrich was an excellent administrator and would be...

The Sapper in the Sewer

by Kym Robinson | Jan 12, 2022 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

“The enemy was nowhere, but everywhere.”- Dan Rather, CBS News Report, Saigon, 1968 As the world approaches a period of unmanned systems, automation, and perhaps in many fields human obsolescence, warfare marches into its own future of certain uncertainty. Despite the great leaps in technology, warfare is very much the domain of the imperfect human. Perhaps in the not too distant future artificial intelligence will guide and “man” killing machines against one another and human beings. Engineers and geniuses will create and devise such killing machines to ensure that governments stay standing...

The Human Under the Numbers

by Kym Robinson | Dec 30, 2021 | Featured Articles

The story of Anne Frank is tragic. If not for the words that she wrote in her diary, she would be a digit of history. Her diary is relatable, and the thoughts that collected inside her being during a horrible time in history gives the reader an idea of who she was. She is immortalized because of the little things that she wrote, not because of any great deeds recorded by others. As a victim of tyranny she is remembered as an innocent murdered. She is a story found inside the numbers. Thanks to her diary, we have a human figure to know and mourn, despite the mechanized bureaucratic...

Australia’s History of Benevolent Fascism

by Kym Robinson | Dec 1, 2021 | Featured Articles

You can read Part I of this essay, published in September 2021, here. Australia has had a history of complicated relationships between the governments that ruled over its vast sunburned lands and the individual citizens subject to such rule. The states and territories of Australia have had a degree of autonomy when it comes to how they may exercise control over the individual. The police have been an integral tool for these state governments to violate human rights and individual freedom. As is always the case a context of crisis is used and even when emergency powers are not directly cited,...

The War on Drugs for Her

by Kym Robinson | Oct 14, 2021 | Criminal Justice, Featured Articles

She had just turned fifteen. She was a good girl, though some of her friends had a wilder side. They did like to party. She was excited to attend a music festival, a large one geared to people under eighteen. While she was there the police were conducting an operation to curb the use of recreational drugs. Twenty or so teenagers, including herself, had been taken almost at random by the police officers. It was a hot day, so she had worn very little. As she was taken away she was roughly handled. The police officers accused her of being in possession of drugs, a girl who had not even tried...

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