A common counter-argument to many libertarian principles goes something along the lines of, “Without the government, who will build to roads?" Almost everyone who has tried to debate libertarian ideology will encounter this argument at some point. In the minds of many statists, economic services that are almost ubiquitously provided by the government in the United States and elsewhere could not possibly be provided by the private sector, lest they be riddled with market failures and corruption. More often than not, they only make these arguments because they simply have never lived in a...
property
Lessons from Douglas Murray’s ‘The War on the West’
“We appear to be in the process of killing the goose that has laid some very golden Eggs.”- Douglas Murray, author of The War on the West “[A]s recently as 2006, about 18% of social scientists self-identified as Marxists.”- Bryan Caplan, Ph.D., The Prevalence of Marxism in Academia (March 21, 2015, EconLib.org) I was always ashamed to be a Westerner. A civilization, I was told all through my public schooling years, uniquely contributed to the world in the following ways: slavery, child labor, bad working conditions, greed, sexism, genocide, racism, McCarthyism, and a bunch of useful...
Privacy as a Property Right
In 1993 I wrote an article at the Cato Institute that may be relevant to the current controversy over abortion and the Supreme Court: "Dissolving the Inkblot: Privacy as a Property Right."
News Roundup 5/3/2022
US News A judge grants qualified immunity to police officers who arrested and held a man for operating a parody Facebook account. [Link] The FBI conducted nearly 2 million warrantless searches using Russian cyber threats as an excuse. [Link] Lawmakers will likely increase the INDOPACCOM budget by $3 billion more than the White House requested. [Link] Venezuela Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke with self-proclaimed Venezuelan President Juan Guaido and reaffirmed his claim to power. [Link] Russia Biden visits a Lockheed Martin plant producing Javelin missiles. [Link] Putin told French...
No, Disney World Isn’t the First of ‘One Thousand Liechtensteins’
One of the stranger narratives coming out of the controversy over Disney's "special district" in Florida is the notion that Disney's Florida property is some sort of truly independent self-governing entity operating without government oversight. Most claims in this regard wildly overestimate the degree to which Disney enjoys self-governance. Some also claim that Disney's Florida special district represents some sort of model for a truly "private city" in the model of a sovereign city-state. Or as one Twitter commenter put it, "Unironically, Walt Disney style private city-states is my...
End No-Knock Raids So Cops Stop Killing Innocent Homeowners
In the land of the free—thousands of times a year—American police officers kick in doors, smash windows, deploy tear gas, and explode flashbang grenades all to serve a single, often unarmed, individual with an arrest warrant. These militarized affronts on the homes and property of often entirely innocent individuals all too frequently end with the suffering of the innocent or loss of innocent life. Recently, in only a matter of weeks, two different innocent people were killed by police during these raids. Despite the fact that the officers yelled “police” as they broke into the homes...
The Anti-Subjectivist Manifesto: The Case for Consent
Preface “It is not difficult to avoid death, gentlemen; it is much more difficult to avoid wickedness, for it runs faster than death.” - Socrates, Apology The nature of the manifesto is to inform others. To profess some great insight, motivation, or cause, in a manner that is both poignant and powerful. Our goal with this piece is to do just that, for an ethical theory known as “Anti-Subjectivism”, a theory that not only offers a normative framework for determining the “rightness” or “wrongness” of a given set of actions, but also a meta-ethical logic...
Science Deniers Refuse to Admit the Failure of Lockdowns
As hard as it is to believe, the Chinese regime is still employing a “zero covid” strategy and claims it can eradicate covid entirely through lockdowns and vaccinations. China’s draconian, nightmarish, near-total lockdown policy—which is notably still “necessary” in spite of widespread vaccination—has recently been revived in Shanghai, where residents are now struggling to find food. But the regime has only doubled down on the policy, with Chinese president Xi Jinping declaring that “persistence is victory.” This approach has no basis in any actual science, however, and contradicts...
New SCOTUS Petitions Highlight COVID-19 Abuse of Due Process
(Image: Woman arrested for not wearing mask in NY subway to sue police for $10 million https://abcn.ws/30RetW4) If one were to reflect on the essential elements of society, one would quickly identify the need for peaceful dispute resolution. Indeed, on even the most primitive tribal level, peaceful dispute resolution has been the necessary result of human coexistence. We know this because even the most primitive of existing tribes have developed some peaceful form of dispute resolution. In the Anglo-American legal system, the concept of due process emerged as the state assumed the role of...
Cop Enters Family’s Backyard, Shoots Innocent Father, ‘Sentenced’ to Firearms Training
As frequent readers of the Free Thought Project understand, police officers mistake innocent individuals for criminals all the time. Often times, their fear gets the best of them and these folks who have committed no crime and harmed no one, are beaten or arrested only to be exonerated down the road. One man in Idaho Falls, however, will not have a chance to be exonerated because the police who mistook him for a suspect—executed him. On February 8, 2021, Elias Aurelio Cerdas, a 26-year-old officer who graduated from training less than a year before the shooting, entered the backyard of...