Author: Brandon Christensen

Updates and Accolades

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Hello all. I’ve been busy lately. Will hopefully have some cool stuff starting next weekend or so.

In the mean time, The American Conservative recently highlighted Notes On Liberty for being a libertarian blog that is actually worth reading.

Also, I happened to win the first ever annual monthly blog contest now being put on by the Foundation for Economic Education. This is a huge honor, and I probably would not have pursued it without your readership and, more importantly, your critiques over the last year and a half.

I know I’ve mentioned this before, but RealClearHistory also gave Notes On Liberty a shout-out for some of our work on colonialism back in February.

All three organizations are well worth adding to your daily reading routine. I’ll be graduating from college next weekend. My school’s quarterly A&E magazine did a feature on me and you can check that out here.

Logical Fallacies in the Press

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Hank blogs about yet another hit job on libertarianism in the press, this time coming from some hack named Michael Lind in Salon. Unfortunately, the whole thing is based upon a logical fallacy that is buried in the seventh paragraph of the piece. Lind wonders aloud:

But think about this for a moment. If socialism is discredited by the failure of communist regimes in the real world, why isn’t libertarianism discredited by the absence of any libertarian regimes in the real world?

This is a basic logical fallacy known as (in Latin) argumentum a silentio, or an argument from silence. An argument from silence is a conclusion drawn based on the absence of evidence. Logical fallacies coming from the enemies of freedom are not always to be ignored, and Hank did us all a service by trying to earnestly straighten out Lind’s fallacious reasoning, but at the same time, we know from careful research that most arguments are based off of dishonesty, plain and simple.

Here is the upside, though: as Dr Gibson points out, the fact that the press is even paying attention to libertarian arguments suggests that more savagery from the Left is coming our way. Given that the Left is morally and ideologically bankrupt, this should serve as some small comfort to those of us who yearn for a less paternalistic and condescending society.

Addendum (6/6): Will Wilkinson has more over at Democracy in America. Tom Woods chimes in as well.

Maryland v. King: Scalia’s Noble Dissent

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I’m definitely not Antonin Scalia’s biggest fan, but – as the Cato Institute’s Walter Olson writes – “if there’s ever a time when Antonin Scalia really rises to the occasion, it’s when he serves as the Supreme Court’s liberal conscience.”

His dissent from the recent SCOTUS ruling on Maryland v King is, like the somewhat recent ObamaCare ruling, a glimmer of hope amidst all the despair. For those of you who are wondering, Maryland v. King is about whether or not the government has the right to extract your DNA – once you are arrested (but not booked or taken to jail) – and place it into a national search database.

And, in case you are further wondering, the distinction I drew between being arrested and being booked or taken to jail is an important one. This is because cops can arrest you without ever using handcuffs. All they have to do is utter the magic words: “you’re under arrest.” So, as an example, a cop can pull you over for having a broken taillight and if he doesn’t like your attitude he can simply arrest you. You don’t even have to get out of your car.

Here is a breakdown: Continue reading →

Capitalism: Making Lives Miserable Since at least the Late 18th Century

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Brad Plumer of The Washington Post has a great post up on 31 different charts “that will destroy your faith in humanity.” Here was one of my favorites:

After reading through the charts, come back and let me know what you think of them. For more optimistic garbage, be sure to check this out.

Around the Web

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  1. Implementing ObamaCare: “Grate” expectations
  2. Further problems with ObamaCare implementation
  3. US Health Care System Doesn’t Need Price Controls, It Needs Price Signals
  4. Australians of reddit: What North American Animal Scares the F*** Out of You?
  5. Distribution of train lines around the world
  6. The End of Europe’s Welfare States

  7. Dear Class of 2013: You’re pampered, privileged and oversexed—but at least your employment prospects are dim

Istanbul: The Protests

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A moderately Islamist government has been in power in Turkey for about 10 years now. Over the weekend it faced its first stern test. One brave Turkish blogger has decided to reach out to the rest of the world:

No newspaper, no television channel was there to report the protest. It was a complete media black out.

But the police arrived with water cannon vehicles and pepper spray.  They chased the crowds out of the park.

In the evening of May 31st the number of protesters multiplied. So did the number of police forces around the park. Meanwhile local government of Istanbul shut down all the ways leading up to Taksim square where the Gezi Park is located. The metro was shut down, ferries were cancelled, roads were blocked.

Yet more and more people made their way up to the center of the city by walking.

They came from all around Istanbul. They came from all different backgrounds, different ideologies, different religions. They all gathered to prevent the demolition of something bigger than the park:

The right to live as honorable citizens of this country.

Read the rest. Hurriyet, one of Turkey’s best media outlets, has been doing an excellent job covering events after the fact. Their English-language site is here, and I recommend reading the site on a daily basis (even after the violence is over).

Here is my two cents: the Erdogan government (the Islamist one) put one too many straws upon the camel’s back. Ankara simply took too many liberties when it came to regulating the cultural and material life of the Turkish people. Too many blasphemy laws and too many clothing restrictions, coupled with too poor an economic performance made these protests inevitable. The harsh crackdown on an otherwise free people ensured violence and larger protests.

By the way, Turkey’s first post-Ottoman government, headed by the ardent secularist and Europhile, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, also insisted on regulating the cultural and material lives of Turkish citizens, so Islam has nothing to do with this (check out our many discussions we’ve had here on the blog on this).

Rather, the “authoritarianism lite” of the Turkish state has more to do with its status as a post-colonial imperial state and a Cold War pawn than it does with any inherent cultural traits of the Turkish people or of the Islamic faith.

Around the Web

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Links
  1. How Parents (kind of) Around the World Describe Their Children
  2. Why Indian-Americans dominate Spellings Bees
  3. Fracking is Pitting OPEC Members Against Each Other. It Couldn’t Happen to a Nicer Bunch of Cartel Members.
  4. A Closer Look at Botswana’s Developments
  5. Antarctica without its Ice Caps

Liberalization in India, and NOT Just in Markets

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Shikha Dalmia, of Reason, has a new piece up in the Wall Street Journal on India’s harassment problem:

I’ve never met an Indian woman—rich or poor, upper or lower caste, pretty or homely, young or middle-age—who hasn’t been harassed […] Unlike rape and sex-selective abortion, which represent a genuine devaluing of women, sexual harassment in India is, I believe, an expression not of the power of Indian men but of their helplessness. It’s a pathetic attempt to have a sexual encounter, no matter how meaningless and evanescent. Its real cause is free-floating male libido with no socially acceptable outlet.

India’s sexual mores and institutions are rooted in a pastoral past, when people died before 50, so marriages between minors were the norm. Families in villages would betroth their children, at birth sometimes, and have a formal ceremony after both attained puberty, when the girl went to live with her husband’s family. This arrangement, now banned, had many horrendous downsides, but it produced an organic harmony between the sexual needs of individuals and the social expectations of monogamy and chastity […]

What would work [for easing India’s harassment problem]? Nothing short of transforming India’s puritanical culture and giving men and women more freedom to forge sexually mature relationships outside of marriage.

Read the whole thing. I don’t know how much good liberalizing India’s sexual mores would be without first more liberalization in markets. I often think of the US’s own problems when it comes to the sexual revolution of the 1960s: more STDs, more unplanned, unwanted pregnancies, and more costs associated with public health. Another downside was the attempt, by certain feminists, to destroy the very libido of men that Dalmia recommends liberalizing. The attempts by these authoritarians can still be felt today, especially in American universities (see Ken Masugi’s thoughtful piece on this problem).

Clean B****oles Becoming A Rarity in Socialist Venezuela

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I know this has been making the rounds in the blogsophere, but it’s still worth highlighting: Venezuela is facing shortages for a number of basic consumer goods, including toilet paper. Naturally, the socialists who have been in power for the past 14 years have tried to pin the blame on the opposition and the United States. From Hurriyet (“Turkey’s leading English daily”):

The South American OPEC member has the world’s largest proven oil reserves but has wrestled with periodic shortages of several consumer goods since price controls were imposed in 2003 under the late socialist leader Hugo Chavez.

“We have consistently denounced the strategy of hoarding and speculation, and the campaign of terror that has spread among the people, forcing them to buy compulsively and fearfully,” ruling party lawmaker Jose Avila said.

The government has long accused the center-right opposition and the United States of plotting to undermine Chavez’s self-styled socialist revolution.

Indeed. And how does the socialist government of Venezuela plan to counter the chronic shortages that price controls have created? Why, with more government programs of course:

Venezuela’s National Assembly on Tuesday approved a $79 million credit to import toilet paper and other personal hygiene products to relieve shortages in the petroleum-rich state.

There are more damning indictments of socialism as well, though none are explicit. In other news, I always smirk whenever I hear an ardent supporter of the current thief-in-chief here in the States try to pin the bad economy on the Bush administration’s mistakes. It’s been, what, five years now?

A Possible Explanation for Greece’s Economic Woes

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And one that does not have to do with Athens’ infamous bookkeeping practices. From the New York Times:

But property ownership in Greece is often less than clear cut. So Mr. Hamodrakas put a padlock on his gate and waited to see what would happen. Soon enough, he heard from neighbors. Three of them claimed that they, too, had title to parts of the property.

In this age of satellite imagery, digital records and the instantaneous exchange of information, most of Greece’s land transaction records are still handwritten in ledgers, logged in by last names. No lot numbers. No clarity on boundaries or zoning. No obvious way to tell whether two people, or 10, have registered ownership of the same property.

Yikes. There is more here. I highly recommend it.

Forget fiscal and monetary policy, Greece needs to instate a decent property rights regime before it can become a wealthy and healthy property-owning democracy.

This should not be surprising for a couple of reasons, but only if one is somewhat familiar with the modern history of the region. The Balkans has been, until very recently, under the thumb of various empires governed from afar (Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian). Once independence from foreign despots was attained (through war) in the nineteenth century, these states then had to survive more war (World Wars), endure more occupation (through the same world wars), and then navigate their young states through the Cold War (where dictatorship was sometimes preferable to ideological considerations, and sometimes integral to ideological considerations). In addition, Balkan states have had to constantly deal with threats from each other as well.

If anything, the inclusion of these states into the European Union is probably the best thing to happen to them in a long, long, long time. It is unfortunate that bureaucrats in Brussels decided to hastily implement a single currency without first ensuring that each of the member states possessed the institutions necessary for protecting clear and well-defined property rights.

Update: On the other hand, entry into the EU was probably (correctly) seen as a way to strengthen institutions associated with protecting property rights.

Reading Hayek in Beijing

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That’s the subject of a fascinating account of life in China through the eyes of a dissident in this last week’s Wall Street Journal. An excerpt:

Put another way, the conventional notion that the modern Chinese system combines political authoritarianism with economic liberalism is mistaken: A more accurate description of the recipe is dictatorship and cronyism, with the results showing up in rampant corruption, environmental degradation and wide inequalities between the politically well-connected and everyone else. “There are two major forms of hatred” in China today, Mr. Yang explains. “Hatred toward the rich; hatred toward the powerful, the officials.” As often as not they are one and the same.

There is more, too: Continue reading →

ObamaCare Snark

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Oh, the delicious irony. From Yahoo! news:

Unions backed the health care legislation because they expected it to curb inflation in health coverage, reduce the number of uninsured Americans and level the playing field for companies that were already providing quality benefits. While unions knew there were lingering issues after the law passed, they believed those could be fixed through rulemaking.

But last month, the union representing roofers issued a statement calling for “repeal or complete reform” of the health care law. Kinsey Robinson, president of the United Union of Roofers, Waterproofers and Allied Workers, complained that labor’s concerns over the health care law “have not been addressed, or in some instances, totally ignored.”

“In the rush to achieve its passage, many of the act’s provisions were not fully conceived, resulting in unintended consequences that are inconsistent with the promise that those who were satisfied with their employer-sponsored coverage could keep it,” Robinson said.

Well no shit Sherlock. There is more: Continue reading →

Optimism and Despair in a World of Injustice

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The infamous development economist William Easterly recently tweeted that writing about spontaneous order without citing Friedrich Hayek is now “mainstream cool,” while writing about spontaneous order and citing Hayek makes one an ideological extremist. This biting critique of intellectual discourse, a mere 140 characters long, does more than just expose the drastic ideological shortcomings of the modern Left. It highlights the endlessly interesting obstinate ignorance that collectivists of all stripes have historically displayed toward the basic theoretical and moral insights advanced by libertarians.

In a recent Freeman essay by anthropologist Mike Reid, a pattern similar to the one noticed by Easterly emerges in the actions of central planners aiming to preserve the cultural heritage of a number of ethnic groups that have been deprived of their property rights by the very governments now looking to preserve their cultures for them. Reid takes examples from India and Canada and finds that the logic of preserving a specific culture does not hold up to scrutiny.

On the policies of the government of India, Reid writes: Continue reading →

Around the Web

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  1. Are you a liberal imperialist? Stephen Walt asks the question and lists ten signs that you may be one.
  2. Will Obama attack Syria in the face of so many domestic scandals?
  3. Libertarians care about more than just themselves. Bryan Caplan explains why.
  4. Big Country Blues.
  5. Great post on civil society and its work exposing police corruption. Don’t forget that police departments are now heavily unionized…
  6. Human Rights and Democracy Statistics. A short, informative video by a Swedish epidemiologist and statistician.
  7. Ha. Ha.

What is the “Chinese Dream”?

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The short answer is that it is the new slogan that new Premier Xi Jinping (who hung out in Iowa as a youth) has come up with. The longer answer is that it is basically a knock-off of the “American Dream” used here in the States, but minus the folksiness and with the added predictability of being engineered from the top down to harness a buoyant nationalism in the post-socialist state.

From Lily Kuo, writing in Quartz:

 Xi used the word “dream” at least 23 times in his speech to accept the post of president. Xi spoke of the need to “build a strong, democratic, civilized, and harmonious modern socialist country and to attain the Chinese Dream of the great renaissance of the Chinese nation” […]

In Xi’s estimation, the Chinese Dream isn’t meant to be a collection of individuals’ hopes and aspirations. Instead, the dreams of Chinese citizens are to be shaped to fit the government’s vision, rather than the other way around. To that end, the Chinese government has tasked “educators” with uniting “the Chinese dream [with] the dreams of youth and students, to grow up and become useful members of society,” according to the People’s Daily […]

Elusive expressions like Jiang Zemin’s “three represents” (which refers to the three pillars of the party—military, culture and public interest) and Mao Zedong’s “destruction of the four olds” (which connotes the destruction of pre-communist Chinese values) catalogue important transitions in China and form part of each leader’s legacy […]

There is more, and it is very interesting indeed, including the “Seven Don’t Mentions”:

constitutionalism, democracy, civil society, neoliberalism and Western media bias.

Don’t ask me why there are only five! When you read it, do try to remember my short essay on the future of Chinese nationalism. I also think it is pertinent to note that even our scandal-wracked President has not, and does not, procure paternalistic slogans the way the Communist Party in China does. In fact, the American people haven’t dealt with these kinds of slogans since the fascistic Roosevelt administration and his “new deal.” This is not to say that I think Obama is anything more than a thug in a nice suit, but only that our liberal democratic foundations are stronger than we sometimes realize (thanks largely to the same free press that Obama has been trying to intimidate lately).

As an added bonus, here is a collection of our short notes about the fact that fascism and communism are just two strands of the same vile idea: paternalism.