TGIF: Year-End Downers

TGIF: Year-End Downers

by | Dec 23, 2022 | , , , , , ,

One always hopes to end the year on a high note, but politically speaking, at least, that is difficult again in 2022. One searches in vain for advances in individual liberty and setbacks for power. Sure, with the receding of the pandemic, life has returned to normal in many respects. But the ratchet effect that Robert Higgs identified still is the rule. After a rise in government power in response to a crisis (real or imagined), the drop-back is never complete because those who wield power have had their appetite whetted. The precedent itself presents a new threat. If the federal and state...

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TGIF: The State Fuels Identity Politics

TGIF: The State Fuels Identity Politics

by | Dec 16, 2022 | , , , ,

Anyone with an ounce of good sense knows that destructive identity politics is run amuck in America and elsewhere. All incentives these days seem to go in one direction: toward identifying oneself as a member of an aggrieved group supposedly due compensation through government action -- of course at the expense of people who had nothing to do with the grievance. The actual perpetrators (if any), like the actual victims, tend to have long departed this world. Where real victims and perpetrators are still on the scene, grievances ought to be handled on an individual basis with due process,...

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Walter Grinder, 1938-2022

by | Dec 10, 2022 | ,

I note with great sadness the passing of my friend and former colleague Walter Grinder on Dec. 4. He was 84. Walter may be the most important libertarian that most libertarians have never heard of. Although he made important contributions to the literature of liberty (such as his work with John Hagel on the far-reaching destructive effects of state intervention in money and banking and his introduction to Albert Jay Nock's classic, Our Enemy the State), he devoted his professional activities primarily to keeping libertarian scholars and writers informed about a wide range of literature...

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TGIF: Why Freedom Is the Goal

TGIF: Why Freedom Is the Goal

by | Dec 9, 2022 | , , , ,

In online interviews and conversations I'm hearing intellectuals in the national conservative movement say that the liberal Enlightenment "project" has mostly failed because people need more in their lives than freedom. I've also heard this from a few people who have lately become disillusioned with leftism but yet are uneasy about libertarianism. My first response is to wonder whom these critics of classical liberalism, or libertarianism, its modern-day form, have in mind. Which important and widely influential liberal political, economic, or, social thinker even implied that freedom is the...

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TGIF: On Liberty and Security

TGIF: On Liberty and Security

by | Dec 2, 2022 | , , , , , ,

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." Benjamin Franklin's famous words are often quoted because, alas, they are always relevant. Whether Franklin meant what libertarians take him to have meant has been challenged in recent years. See this disagreement between Benjamin Wittes and Leya Delray. In defense of her interpretation, Delray argues that Franklin shed light on his meaning when he quoted himself 20 years later. Whoever is right, for Franklin the word liberty on these occasions meant not individual freedom...

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TGIF: Beware the Regulatory Storm over FTX

TGIF: Beware the Regulatory Storm over FTX

by | Nov 18, 2022 | , , , , ,

The bankruptcy of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX and the alleged fraud by co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried, which has cost customers millions, is tailor-made for anyone who already wants the power of government to expand, especially in the area of financial privacy. For that reason I think it would be useful to take a 30,000-foot view of the matter. I offer these considerations as someone with no more than a layman's knowledge of the cryptocurrency phenomenon. (I found this Reason video helpful.) First, fraud is illegal. If a firm accepts money from clients and uses it in violation of the...

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TGIF: Midterm Blues

TGIF: Midterm Blues

by | Nov 11, 2022 | , , , ,

As midterm elections go, for champions of individual liberty this one could have been worse. I see two bright spots. The likely slim majority of Republicans in the House could -- maybe -- produce a measure of gridlock on domestic spending and regulation, and the blame for the Republicans' substandard midterm performance might fall entirely on Donald Trump, driving him from the stage. When you consider all the possible outcomes from Tuesday, that's not bad. In most midterm years the only outcome worth hoping for is gridlock. Gridlock, however, wouldn't be the best outcome under all...

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TGIF: Election Day 2022

TGIF: Election Day 2022

by | Nov 4, 2022 | , ,

Another election day is upon us. We're told that we have a duty to vote because so many Americans gave their lives for that right. But perhaps it ought to be spelled R-I-T-E, as in a religious ritual. Is it a duty or a right? Let's make up our minds. In 21 countries voting is mandatory -- although the law is not always enforced -- but that absurd idea has never had traction here. There is something weird about an alleged right that one is compelled to exercise. It certainly would be unique. And did Americans really fight wars for the vote? Many who were killed in wars that the government...

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