- Gun control: change we don’t believe in
- A photo essay of Antarctica. I’m weird (news flash!) and I’ve always had an obsession with Antarctica
- On the ethics of voting. Grab a cup of coffee or tea
- Canada’s First Nations: Time we stopped meeting like this
- What is driving growth in government? This weekend’s must-read
Current Events
Fresh Blood!
We’ve got a couple of new changes coming your way: younger bloggers!
Stay tuned, and enjoy the ‘comments’ thread on my recent post in the meantime (don’t forget to have your say as well).
Libertarianism and Feminism
I thought I’d throw in my two cents on the recent brouhaha between the two largest camps within the libertarian movement (the “paleos” and the “bleeding hearts”). Really quickly, the differences between the two camps are few and far between on matters of economics, but on matters of culture there is a wide chasm separating the two. The paleos are cultural conservatives and the bleeding hearts are not.
For the record, I consider myself in the “bleeding heart” camp, even though I spent more than enough time in Santa Cruz doing the co-op thing and hanging out out with lazy, dishonest, stinking hippies.
The bleeding heart camp initiated the brouhaha with the following:
This morning Julie Borowski, who makes videos as “Token Libertarian Girl,” shared her answer to the question “Why aren’t there more female libertarians?” […]
Every single one of these things that she criticizes women for doing should be seen not as causes for shame, but as complex choices that smart, thoughtful women can and do make, without destroying their lives in the process. In addition, Borowski is making arguments that conservatives hurl at women all the time. If we want to pull young women away from liberalism and toward libertarianism, repeating the very same intellectually patronizing conservative arguments that pushed women to liberalism in the first place doesn’t seem to be the way to go.
And a follow-up post had this tidbit to add: Continue reading
Environmentalism and Property Rights
The horrible air in Beijing has been making the news again, and for good reason. Check out these pictures for reasons why. The topic of environmentalism and its compatibility with liberty has been brought up before here at the consortium, but I’d like to briefly use this opportunity to point out something on property rights.
Conservatives and, lamentably, some libertarians often attribute environmental destruction to “the tragedy of the commons,” but this is short-sighted. Anthropologists have long pointed out that land and property held in common is actually governed quite well. Political scientists and economists have recently begun to come around to this point as well, with Elinor Ostrom (a political scientist by training) winning the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics for her work on how some societies govern the commons.
Common land and its use often requires an informal set of rules for maintaining a harmonious balance between man and land, and is also a characteristic feature of societies that we would variously label, rightly or wrongly, as stateless, pastoral, foraging, tribal, or my personal favorite: undeveloped. In other words, common land is often exploited by poor people who do not have the resources to institute a regime based largely on private property. With this in mind, just think: would you want to be the party that is found guilty for violating an agreed-upon set of rules for a specific area of land? Even if there were no formal state apparatus charged with enforcing a society’s rules? Not only would you have to face justice, but you’d also be held responsible for the possible suffering of many other people depending on the land, which could lead to other forms of punishment besides fines or violence; punishments that could affect the lives of your loved ones and your loved ones’ loved ones. Continue reading
Don’t Forget
Michael Adamson’s new book, A Better Way to Build…, comes out on the 15th of this month. You can check out more of Dr. Adamson’s (bad ass) work in the ‘recommendations‘ section of the blog. He’s got stuff on Native American property rights (or lack thereof), US foreign policy, and the decline of Argentina just hanging out online waiting for curious minds to read and process.
Dr. Adamson is a historian by trade, and we’re lucky to have him on board here at the consortium. Also, check out his demolishing of the rationales used by the Bush administration to go to war in Iraq (the second time around).
Sardines: A Sordid Story
Sardines are delicious and healthy to eat, but much of the consumption of these fish is for feeding to animals, and this is destroying the wildlife of the seas. We are possibly witnessing the fulfilling of the prophetic verse in Revelation 8:9, “one third of the living creatures which were in the sea died” (World English Bible).
Already several fish ecologies, such as the fish by the coast of Namibia, have collapsed. Sardines and anchovies are in some places the main prey of the predators up the food chain, including birds, seals, dolphins, and whales.
Much of the sardine catch is ground up and fed to farmed fish and factory-farmed chickens and pigs. World-wide, 14 million tons of wild fish, such as sardines and anchovies, are fed to mass-produced food animals. About 75 percent of the fishmeal and oil fed to carnivorous farmed fish come from the harvest of small, open-ocean fish such as anchovies, herring, and sardines. When you eat a farmed salmon, you indirectly eat sardines and the other fish feed. Continue reading
RIP James Buchanan
Nobel laureate and classical liberal economist James Buchanan has died at the grand old age of 93. I have been slowly working my way through his book The Calculus of Consent for a while now, and his other works are on my “to do” list once I graduate in June. He was one of the co-founders of public choice theory, a rather common sense approach to economics that has long been derided by authoritarians on the Left.
EconLib has a succinct biography of him here.
This short piece by Buchanan in the Independent Review has influenced my own way of approaching writing and arguing.
I’ll post more thoughts from around the web as they appear throughout the day.
Liberty has lost a true champion today.
Government’s War on Sharing
There is a fuzzy border between trading and sharing. Suppose Adam gathers apples and Eve gathers oranges. The each want some of the other, so they can either trade some of the fruits, or they can share them. The result is the same: they each eat some of both.
Sharing implies that one gives the other some of the goods, and the other gives some to you, but reciprocal sharing is about the same as trading, perhaps though with a psychological difference.
Now comes the income tax to turn the beautiful act of sharing into a taxable commercial transaction. To the government, barter is just as much income as selling for cash. If you trade an apple for an orange, it has the same economic effect as selling the apple for cash, and then using the cash to buy the orange from your trading partner. The person trading his apple is subject to the same tax as the one selling for cash. Continue reading
Plastic Pollution in the Ocean
The world’s oceans are being poisoned. Some of the plastic litter is visible, such as in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. There, plastics and other debris are trapped by the “gyres” or currents of the North Pacific. Some plastics float while others sink.
Even worse are the plastic particles that are not visible. Much of the plastic tossed into the ocean breaks down into molecules, both of the plastic material and also of toxic chemicals. The particles are eaten by fish and other animals. The plastics then enter the food chain for fish, birds, turtles – and human beings. Worse yet, the plastic molecules absorb pollutants, so the food chain gets poisoned. The pollutants become ever more concentrated as they go up the food chain of contaminated animals. Pollution from eating fish becomes a source of diseases such as cancer. Continue reading
The Sales Tax Petard
For years, the web-based book seller Amazon.com had not been charging sales tax in states in which it did not have a physical presence such as a store. States do not have legal jurisdiction over enterprises that are not located within their territory, although Amazon and other companies have had relationships with affiliate companies, which makes the concept of a physical presence unclear.
Customers who do not pay a sales tax to the seller are supposed to pay a Ause@ tax that is equivalent to a sales tax, but they rarely do this, due to the absence of enforcement. This proves that most people do not consider a tax on goods to be a moral obligation.
Now the sales-tax-free era is coming to an end. Book store owners had long complained that it was unjust for them to pay sales taxes while web-based sellers were not charging the tax. In California and some other states, the sales tax rate is about ten percent, a substantial difference when the price of a book is high, and the books can be mailed at the low-cost media rate. Continue reading
GDP: Who Needs It?
“For so it is, oh my Lord God, I measure it, but what it is that I measure I do not know.” –St. Augustine
Gross Domestic Product (GDP) gets a lot of attention these days. It’s fair game for bloggers, talking heads, perhaps your local barber. While most agree that higher GDP is better than lower, there are problems, some better-known than others. Some theorists have considered the concept hopeless, such as Austrian economist Oskar Morgenstern, who called GNP (the predecessor to GDP) “primitive in the extreme and certainly useless.” Lamenting the idea that the whole of a nation’s economic activity could be captured in a single number, he said that “very few men, even few economists, or should I say regretfully, especially economists, have a real appreciation and understanding of the immense complexity of an economic system.”
Let’s get the formal definition out of the way. GDP is the market value of all final goods and services produced in a particular country in a given year. The federal Bureau of Economic Analysis computes this number and releases it quarterly. The level of GDP is used as a basis for evaluating other things, like the national debt, which currently stands at about 85 percent of one year’s GDP in the United States. GDP growth rates are closely followed. These are inflation-adjusted, seasonally adjusted, and annualized, and are of course supposed to tell us how well the economy is doing.
Simon Kuznets gets credit for the first serious attempt to calculate national income figures, publishing his first work on the subject in 1941. Following in his footsteps, calculation of GDP and other “national income accounts” has become a core area of the economics profession. The explosion of economic and financial news has thrust GDP into the limelight in recent years. Continue reading
From the Comments: Militias and the Second Amendment
Longtime reader (and blogger) Hank Moore has been on a roll lately. In response to a condescending (and fact-free) comment made by a Leftist concerning gun rights, Hank responds with this:
That is very interesting that you would bring up the militia. Were you sincere and knowledgeable on this matter you might know that THIS, the militia, more properly to keep the militia from becoming a rabble and to circumvent the need for a standing army, was the main point of the Second Amendment. Not gun ownership.
The right to own whatever you could legally acquire without causing harm to someone by way of that acquisition was (and is) already an inalienable right, protected not only by the Constitution’s very structure (negative law) but by the Ninth and in a sense Fourth and Tenth Amendments as well.
The Second Amendment threw in that much-hyped line about the right to bear arms precisely so people like you wouldn’t interpret “well-regulated militia” as anything other than what it was (FYI, it had absolutely nothing to do with “conquering the frontier”). That is, a group of local men banding together when the need arose to protect what’s theirs (including their guns). But that is exactly what you have done. Misinterpreted it. But not because the language of that particular Amendment is so unclear (although I do wonder if their is a language barrier between collectivists and people who like to mind their own business, and no I don’t refer here to that obnoxious limey Piers Morgan’s pretentious accent), but because as a whole, the document the Constitution has fallen into disuse. In the era of positive law and positive rights, why even have one?
The answer is so that you (the politician or the lobby or the activist) can appeal to people who know deep down that arbitrary power is morally reprehensible, and thus bitterly cling to some semblance of a social contract; but who still have stupid ignorant ideas (by this I mean gun-control) that they want to shove down everyone else’s throat. Oh, and our founders wouldn’t know what you meant by military style weapons. Do you mean the military-style weapons that they used to defeat the British and would have been mercilessly slaughtered without? Or do you mean today’s military-style weapons that only certain classes of benign uniformed government-employees are permitted to own under your reading of the Second Amendment?
Anybody out there care to answer Hank’s questions? Well done! Here is Hank’s blog one more time. Do check it out.
How to Make the New Year Better
Many economists and financial analysts are making conjectures about when the recession will bottom out and how strong the recovery will be. The speed of recovery depends on the policies of government world wide. With the best policies, the economy could recover within three months. With bad policies, such as occurred during the Great Depression, the economy could stay down for years.
One bad policy that made the depression worse was the erection of trade barriers. The US enacted a high tariff in 1930, and other countries also restricted imports, and world trade broke down. Companies that sold goods abroad could no longer stay in business. Farmers suffered as foreigners could not buy their crops.
Unfortunately, many countries today are repeating this policy error. The German philosopher Hegel was right when he observed that governments do not learn from history. Indonesia is requiring new licenses and taxes for imports. Russia has raised tariffs on imported cars and food. India has levied a tariff on imported soybean oil. The chiefs of each country think that they are protecting their home industries, but they are ignoring the lessons of the Great Depression, as trade limitation is contagious. If political pressure induces them to do something, a money subsidy is preferable to a trade barrier, since that does not distort prices as much. Continue reading
Sharon Presley’s Newest Projects
So, I have been begging Dr. Sharon Presley to blog with us here at NotesOnLiberty for about a year now, and largely for one big reason:
She is a rock star within the libertarian movement. She has been an anarchist and an individualist feminist since before I was born, and she has always pointed out to a largely male-dominated quadrant of American politics (the libertarian one) that the movement has been shooting itself in the foot by not being more inclusive to women. She’s right, of course. Most of the women that I talk to about politics (which is a small sample, I usually try to stay on target) think libertarianism is bad ass once it has been explained to them in a coherent, progressive manner (like we do here at NotesOnLiberty).
Since she has been an activist for so long, she has a long CV filled with top-notch editorials and journal articles, as well as a number of books (which you can find to the right of this post).
She also has a different academic background than most libertarians, which is something I can appreciate as an anthropology major. A psychologist by training, Dr. Presley, has spent a lifetime helping people free themselves from various types of control.
Right now she is currently the managing editor of Free Voices: A Magazine of Anarchist Thought, the executive director (and co-founder) of the Association of Libertarian Feminists, and has recently launched another magazine project called The Free Woman Magazine. Needless to say, she is a very busy woman and I certainly understand if she doesn’t have the time for our humble blog, but it would be awesome if/when she join(s) us! In the meantime, do be sure to check out her other projects, as they are vital to maintaining the spontaneous and decentralized nature of the libertarian movement.
PS: here is a great article that she recently linked to on her Facebook page.
What I Did Not Write About Enough in 2012
Climate change
Nothing new there. Alarmists keep lying, making up data, cherry-picking data, exaggerating grossly the consequences of what does happen on the climate front. Not really worth dealing with. Instead, go to the “What’s Up With That” blog every so often. There is a direct link to it on the front of this blog and here also, is the link: Masters, McKibben and Droughting Thomases.
It’s not exactly a dead horse though; it’s a new religion that will find its place among others and perhaps, next to the “Maya Calendar End of the World” cult. Or, maybe not, or maybe, it’s a little more: It looks like one of those widespread but lightly held beliefs. It may become soon like the rule that you don’t walk under a ladder. It might influence legislation yet, but, I think not in a major way. I believe we got off easy.
Belief in global warming plays an important role in my life though. It helps me separate in seconds those who are real skeptics, like me, from those who merely play at pretending to be skeptics in order to glean the social benefits of such skepticism.
And, in case you are wondering, here is my current understanding: There is no warming that is global, and of significant duration, and that’s man-made, and that constitutes an emergency for humankind. Continue reading
Notes On Liberty 