Lifestyles as Means and Ends
During a recent discussion about "nature vs. nurture" as it pertains to homosexuality, I heard a prominent radio host say something that seemed fairly odd to me. He said something like the following:"I...
View ArticleOn IP: Wenzel vs. Kinsella
I was going to set up this post as a response to a specific comment over at the Economic Policy Journal website, but it seems that said comment has been deleted since I first read it. In any case, I'll...
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The Primacy of Bad Arguments
I usually don't take it to be in my purview to attack political humor or satire I generally take it for what it is - entertainment. But given how many people, apparently, turn to entertainment to be...
View ArticleForbidden Fruit
In light of recent events and our seemingly renewed interest in the ethnicity and culture of (some) perpetrators of violence, it seems fitting to write a small post on why I don't feel that all the...
View ArticleBlaming the Victim
I've often been struck by a fairly common retort that comes from conversations about foreign policy and potential blow-back:"You're blaming the victim!"I've heard this more than a handful of times in...
View ArticleThe Cost of Amnesty
I have to wonder, in reading this article, if the same argument(s) would/could be made effectively enough to dissuade Americans from buying into the dissolution of the institution of slavery as well.
View ArticleOn Relative vs. Absolute Scarcity
In mulling over some of the particulars of recent intellectual property debates, a point that has for a long time struck me as clear seemed like it wasn't a point as widely accepted as I'd thought....
View ArticleWhy I Believe in Imaginary Lines
Liberty proponents often ridicule and excoriate supporters of state power by pointing to the arbitrariness of various rules within the system. They'll lament the concept of political jurisdictions and...
View ArticleThe Genius of Cody Wilson
After somehow managing to let the news-pot boil over, I finally got around to listening to several interviews with Cody Wilson; one of the founders of Defense Distributed. It's probably been hard to...
View ArticleTo Protect and Serve
On a radio show I listen to frequently, I've noticed that a lot of hay has been made over the technical obligations of public servants to the people. The critique flows all the way up to the high-water...
View ArticleThe Path of Least Resistance
In recent years I've become more and more convinced that the soundness of particular arguments are more important than their rhetorical value, in the long run. Unfortunately, in a world of soundbytes,...
View ArticleSplitting Hairs
While I feel that these kinds of questions, ultimately, fall apart for similar reasons, it's worth pointing out that the questions are, in fact, different."If your shoes are so good, why do you have to...
View ArticleConfusion: Freedom, Divided
I'm not sure if it's a specifically American phenomenon, but, culturally, we seem particularly fascinated with stories of failure and redemption. And more often than not, that archetype is a very...
View ArticleAn American Civics Lesson
Over the years, I've had a healthy-growing distaste for our effervescent love affair with democracy. Each stripe on the colorful flag of populism seems like a strike against it. Creed, race, nation;...
View ArticleProvocation: the Flight for Asylum
It's hard to say what will become of Edward Snowden. But, like many matters of political intrigue, public focus has drifted almost wholly onto the provocateur himself. In a more perfect world, our...
View ArticleUniversally Arguable Behavior
There are plenty of bad arguments which have the habit of being quite common. I would imagine that almost all of us feel this way about one argument or another. And I'm sure that quite a few of us...
View ArticleSynthetic Solutions
In the past three or four years, I've been increasingly enamored of what I will call synthetic solutions, for lack of a better phrase; the collapsing of seemingly opposing arguments into a singular...
View ArticleQuestions for Free-Market Moralists
Amia Srinivasan recently posed some tough questions to libertarians who like to moralize their support for free markets. The rest of her article aside, I thought I would give a quick but modest...
View ArticleDoubling Down on Prejudice
Over the years my position on free speech and its collision with political correctness has evolved fairly drastically. While I can say that I've held fairly steadfast to an absolutist conception of...
View ArticleThe Limits of My World
I'm pretty disheartened to hear about the legal push-back against 23andme, a company that apparently offers incredibly accessible genetic testing/mapping. Regulators seem to have their eyes fixed on...
View ArticleOn Surfing and Diffusion of Power
A common and fundamental disagreement at the heart of a good part of American political discourse revolves around the nominal balance of power between the individual states and the federal government...
View ArticleThick and Thin - Out of the Abyss
It's no secret that, as of the last several months, one sort of libertarian in-fight has risen to prominence within the heart of the movement; the battle over thick and thin conceptions of...
View ArticleOn Morally Relative Moral Analysis: A Libertarian Disconnect
There are threads being pulled in the context of many national discussions lately that all, troublingly, seem to lead back to the same bare argumentative spool. The argument is one that leads to a...
View ArticleDonald Trump as a Vindication of Left-Libertarianism
For libertarians, especially those among its more palatable flavors, election season isn't so much a time to savor sugary soliloquies to the masses. Nor is it a time to feel buried by the scorn of...
View ArticleOn Conventional Discourse: A Post Mortem
Today, millions of Americans woke up in an alternate world. Some woke up in a world in which there was much to celebrate. Others woke up in a world in which tears of disbelief were all they could...
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