Why does liberty matter? It’s a fair question because, after all, not everyone thinks it matters very much, perhaps beyond some very basic point. If that’s an overstatement, we can safely say that for many people on the left and right, liberty is a lower priority than it is for libertarians and classical liberals. Most pundits and politicians, even most anti-war types, have plans for how to spend your money. What can we libertarians say? We have lots to say. It's a multifront operation. Some libertarians press the case in terms of moral consequentialism, either utilitarian or egoist. Others...
TGIF: Shame on Government for Censoring Us
Alas, federal District Judge Terry A. Doughty's preliminary injunction against government censorship of us on social media has been put on hold. So rules three members of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. But this stay of the injunction in State of Missouri et al. v. Joseph R. Biden Jr. et al. is temporary. NBC News reported a couple of weeks ago that "a different panel drawn from the [same appellate] court, which has 17 active members, will hear arguments on a longer stay." The matter could be resolved quickly though because the three judges "called for arguments in the case to be...
TGIF: What about Politicians?
The best-selling social scientist and, it so happens, libertarian Bryan Caplan thinks politicians are immoral. Sounds promising. He's discussed this online and in one of his published blog-post collections, How Evil Are Politicians?: Essays on Demagoguery. What are we to make of his contention? Caplan isn't using the libertarian nonaggression standard here. Even people who never heard of that standard or who oppose it ought to be at least open to his case. He's really talking about basic decency: the need to avoid gross negligence. Moreover, he thinks it's irrelevant that politicians may...
TGIF: Paternalists Cross the Free-Speech Line
Some pundits are puzzled that respectable mainstream Democrats and "progressives" are no longer free-speech absolutists but rather are enthusiastic defenders of the government's massive effort to squelch expression on the social media platforms. (Glenn Greenwald is one of those puzzled pundits.) The center-left goes so far as to smear the exposers and critics of government censorship as tin-foil-hatted conspiracy theorists. For example, Matt Taibbi is called a "so-called journalist" for his work on the Twitter Files, despite his award-winning career in investigative reporting. And look how...
TGIF: Free Speech Upsets Powers that Be
The Biden administration, along with mainstream politicians and journalists, are really upset that U.S. District Judge Terry A. Doughty has forbidden the executive branch of the central government from communicating with social-media platforms for the purpose of censoring or otherwise suppressing constitutionally protected speech. Judge Doughty's action came in an important free-speech lawsuit filed against the government. He wrote in an accompanying statement: During the COVID-19 pandemic, a period perhaps best characterized by widespread doubt and uncertainty, the United States Government...
TGIF: Good News on Free Speech — for Now
Occasionally, the news makes one cheer. That's the case with a preliminary injunction granted this week (July 4) to stop the federal government from suppressing lawful speech on social media. U.S. District Court Judge Terry A. Doughty took the action in the case of State of Missouri ex rel. Schmitt, et al. v. Joseph R. Biden, Jr., et al. (which I wrote about last year). The pending lawsuit challenged, among other things, the government's power to cajole, lean on, and otherwise less-than-explicitly compel Twitter, Facebook, and the other platforms to remove or suppress lawful speech that...
TGIF: “America First” Need Not Be Antiwar
Today's Trump-inspired "America First" faction cannot be counted on to be consistently noninterventionist and antiwar. That it may lean that way because its chief rival faction is so enthusiastic about foreign adventurism is hardly a firm assurance that it will remain antiwar in the future. We must beware of the assumption that an interventionist foreign policy is, in contrast to America First, by nature "Any Country But America First." Admittedly, advocates of U.S. foreign adventurism often defend their policy choices in terms of the benefits to another population. But that's not all they...
TGIF: Foreign Policy Matters
In an extra special way, foreign policy matters crucially to champions of individual liberty. Not that it doesn't matter to other people too -- just not in all the same ways. Anyone who understands the importance of keeping government power strictly limited in domestic matters (if such power must exist at all) will also grasp the paramount importance of constraining government power abroad. They're cut from the same cloth. This is obvious to libertarians, but not necessarily to others. When Randolph Bourne wrote that "war is the health of the state," he expected his readers to understand...