The most reliable and effective protection for most workers is provided by the existence of many employers. As we have seen, a person who has only one possible employer has little or no protection. The employers who protect a worker are those who would like to hire him. Their demand for his services makes it in the self-interest of his own employer to pay him the full value of his work. If his own employer doesn’t, someone else may be ready to do so. Competition for his services—that is the worker’s real protection.
– Milton Friedman, Free to Choose
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Chris Rock’s New Special Exposes His Political Ignorance
A common claim among Democrats is that, “It’s not that people don’t want to be educated, they just haven’t been given the opportunity, thus government spending on education needs to increase.”
If there were ever a group of people capable of “educating” themselves it would be American celebrities.
Yet it seems as though there is a secret contest among them to see who could be the most historically, economically, and philosophically illiterate.
The most recent example comes from Chris Rock’s “Selective Outrage” Netflix special where he says, “It’s the Royal Family…they invented colonialism.”
Here is a brief list of empires who engaged in Colonialism before the Royal Family did:
- Marhasi Empire
- Islamic Empires
- Akkadian Empire
- Hittite empire
- Assyrian Empire
- Roman Empire
- Babylonian Empire
- Persian Empire
- Shang Dynasty
- Egyptian Empire
- Zhou Dynasty
- Macedonian Empire
- Qin Dynasty
- Han Dynasty
- Armenian Empire
- Xin Dynasty
- Gallic Empire
- Hunnic Empire
- Latin Empire
- Mongol Empire
Other examples from Rock’s “Selective Outrage”:
January 6th
“You see the Capitol riots? White men trying to overthrow the government, that they run!” – Chris Rock
It does not occur to the Social Justice Race Essentialist mind that people who are the same race (and gender) have differing ideas on what is just or unjust. Just because two people are of the same race and gender, it in no way means the person (or group) with power is acting on behalf of those who share their gender or race. It’s akin to saying: “How did a war occur in China between Mao’s Communists and Chiang’s Nationalists? They were all Chinese! How was there a Russian Civil War between Reds and Whites? They were all Russian!”
Ukraine
“America’s in horrible shape. We got it worse, than Ukraine. Yeah I said it…Ukraine is united, and America is clearly divided.” – Chris Rock
I guess after Rock researched the stark contrast between Ukrainian separatists in the Donbas supporting Viktor Yanukovych and those in 2014 supporting Petro Poroshenko leading to an eight-year civil war killing 14,000 people, Rock came to the conclusion that like White men, all Ukrainians are on the same page.
I was not aware that Volodymyr Zelenskyy was on the same page with the people who he enslaved via conscription to fight in his military, the political parties he banned, and the media he nationalized.
Jim Crow
Rock makes a great point at the end about the evils of Jim Crow Laws which forbid Blacks from seeing White dentists. It’s pure evil for a third party to forcibly restrict two consenting parties from engaging in a mutually beneficial voluntary economic exchange. This is the central goal of the Libertarian Institute, and on this issue we stand firmly with Chris Rock!
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War and Delusion: A Critical Examination
In this episode of the Protestant Libertarian Podcast, Alex Bernardo sits down once again with Laurie Calhoun. Laurie is a philosopher, a cultural critic and an author. She is a senior fellow at the Libertarian Institute, where she regularly writes articles analyzing war and the military industrial complex. We discuss her 2013 book War and Delusion, a devastating philosophical and empirical critique of the ‘just war’ theory, which posits that there are conditions under which a war can be justly waged. We explore the inconsistencies of the just war theory, the medieval Christian assumptions that undergird it, the ways in which it has been consistently applied to legitimate American foreign policy, and how it has ultimately led us to war in Ukraine.
Media Referenced:
War and Delusion, Laurie Calhoun
Crime and Poverty
“The theory that crime is caused by poverty is not supported by the known facts. The very poor, in fact, tend to be just as law-abiding as the rich, and perhaps more so. To argue otherwise is to libel multitudes of people who keep to decency under severe difficulties, and in the face of constant temptation.”
—H. L. Mencken, Minority Report: H. L. Mencken’s Notebooks, 1956
Don’t Be Silent
We should reject the fashionable idea that one should never write or post anything that possibly could be used by bad people for bad purposes. That admonition brings two things to mind.
First, it fails its own test. If good people avoid a topic because even constructive analysis might be put to bad use, the very avoidance will likely fuel conspiracy theories about how this or that interest group controls the public debate. Thus the fashionable idea is self-subverting — much as the precautionary principle is.
Second, it reminds me of what Ludwig Wittgenstein, in a very different context, wrote in concluding his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” There are no chilling implications in Wittgenstein’s maxim because he literally meant can not, as opposed to may not. The same can’t be said for the fashionable maxim.
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