- Recent Mexican reforms and the impact on the United States. From Gary Becker.
- Is the Pope’s Capitalism Catholic? Read this for the concise history lesson on Argentina rather than for the Pope’s opinion about public policy.
- Sandy Ikeda asks: Who is really threatened by innovation? Rick’s recent musing on political entrepreneurs can also shed some light on Ikeda’s question.
- The Liberty Constitution, Or, What About Slavery? Some libertarian legal theory for dat ass.
- “Diplomacy.” A transcript of Rand Paul’s recent speech on US foreign policy.
- Why the world needs more globalization, not less.
Links
David Theroux’s latest on Secular Theocracy, Part 2
“Duck Dynasty and the Secular Theocracy, Part 2”
Part 1 can be found here. For more Secular Theocracy as a concept, start here. David founded the Independent Institute, a highly-regarded think tank in the San Francisco Bay Area. In the summer after my first semester of college (2009; I started college in Feb of 2009 after hanging out in Ghana – long story!) I had the opportunity to attend the Independent Institute’s summer seminar for students.
In fact, that summer I attended four seminars put on by various libertarian think tanks and the Institute’s was the first of the summer. I really, really enjoyed it and was able to make some lifelong connections. For example, Dr Foldvary – the co-founder of this blog – was one of the lecturers there. Here is the Institute’s main web site.
Around the Web: Highly Recommended Reading Edition
- Fantastic post about Uganda’s role (and a Ugandan’s perspective) in the ongoing South Sudan conflict.
- Sexual mores: Love in a cold climate. I live in California, but my ancestors come from the frozen wastelands of Scandinavia and northern Germany. Rawr!
- The unacknowledged success of neoliberalism.
- One of my favorite bloggers (Scott Sumner) is joining one of my favorite group blogs (EconLog). I’m a huuuuge fan of group blogs (they’re pretty much the only type of blog I read), so I hope he decides to stay on as a permanent contributor.
- Inglorious Revolutions. Why the West is kinda, sorta hypocritical when it comes to the Arab Spring.
2013: Thanks for a great year
Today marks NOL‘s third year of existence.
It’s been a great ride so far. Below are some of our most popular posts of the year, but first I’d like to highlight the new ventures of some of our guest bloggers over the year.
- Andrew Roth (here are his contributions to NOL) has a new project up that’s well worth your time, Murica Derp.
- Hank Moore (here are his contributions to NOL) has a new project up and running as well, The Libertarian Liquidationist, and you should definitely show him your support.
As far as top 2013 posts at NOL goes, here are some of the most read:
Guillermo Pineda’s post “El grave error del libertarianismo guatelmateco…” was the most most-read post of 2013.
Andrew Roth’s post “Impeach James Clapper” was also a viral hit and Fred Foldvary’s “New Mexico’s Police Breaking Badly” spent a few days at the top of /r/libertarian’s front page.
Warren Gibson’s “Open Season on White Males” was his most popular 2013 post, and his 2012 post on “…Raising the Minimum Wage” went viral.
New notewriters Adam Magoon’s “Debunking the Wage Slavery Myth” and LA Repucci’s “Statists applaud death of unarmed mother…” garnered a lot of reads and our Russian correspondent’s (Evgeniy) debut post “Just to say hello” was wildly popular as well.
Judging by the amount of reads Jacques Delacroix’s post on “Unequal Poverty…” received, I think it’s safe to say that it proved to be controversial, and Payam Ghorbanian’s guest post on the recent Iranian nuclear talks garnered the most reactions.
Rick, Audrey, Michael, Tibor, Jesper, Matthew, Claudio and guest author Peter Miller all put in valuable time to contribute to a better understanding of liberty and freedom. Our third year is going to be our best yet, so don’t go anywhere!
Around the Web
- An Israeli (grad student) and an Iranian (grad student) on the way forward
- An Anarchist’s Proposal for Limited Constitutional Government
- Red White: Why a Founding Father of Postwar Capitalism (Keynesianism) Spied for the Soviets
- Is Fascism Returning to Europe?
- Freedom of Speech: True and False (Duck Dynasty edition)
Around the Web
This is the 69th installment of ‘Around the Web’. Giggity!
- guaranteed income vs. open borders; Economist Kevin Grier weighs the options
- How poverty taxes the brain; A sexy-sounding female gives us the low-down
- The origins of Northwest European ‘guilt culture’; Evolutionary anthropologists are so, soooo cute
- The ‘thoughtful libertarian’ subreddit; Finally!
- Is Christmas efficient? Only an economist (Tyler Cowen) could ask such a thing
- God, Hayek and the Conceit of Reason; Concise essay by Jonathan Neumann in Standpoint
- Milton Friedman’s 1997 musings on a common currency in the European Union: The Euro: From monetary policy to political disunity
Around the Web
- The media’s shooting bias. An excellent take on the hypocrisy of the media. (read David Henderson’s take, too)
- Conservation Native American style (grab a cup of coffee)
- The mission to decentralize the internet; interesting argument, though I don’t think the internet is as centralized as the author makes it out to be.
- Doug Bandow on North Korea’s ongoing purges
- Blast from the past: What did Marxism look like in Mozambique in the 1980s?
Great (new?) resource for historical economic data
UC Davis’s Global Price and Income History Group has a new website up (at least I think it’s new) and it’s got a lot of really, really good data. (h/t again goes to contributing editor Claudio Shikida)
Around the Web: Globalization, Racism and Surfing
- Check out this fascinating reddit thread on ‘blackness’ in the US and the UK. As somebody who has spent a fair amount of time outside of the US, and who is interested in ethnicity from a scholarly perspective, the answers were nothing new to me, but it’s always nice when the streets confirm your suspicions.
- A beautiful photo essay on surfing in Liberia. I wish there were a traditional essay to go along with the photos, but it still suffices.
I think there are too many people in the world who don’t think hard enough about the benefits of globalization (i.e. world trade). As populism continues to gain traction here in the US (and elsewhere I presume), I fear that the everyday beauty a more globalized world gives to us will be thrown under the bus in the name of The People.
Free Trade in Asia
When you get the chance, check out this working paper on market integration and Asia during the 19th and early 20th centuries by David Chilosi and Giovanni Federico. The abstract:
This paper contributes to the debate on globalization and the great divergence with a comprehensive analysis of trends, causes and effects of the integration of Asia in the world market from 1800 to the eve of World War Two, based on a newly compiled data-set. The analysis finds that: most price convergence occurred before 1870, with only little disintegration in the inter-war years; market integration was determined to a large extent by the fall of Western trading monopolies; it implied significant static welfare gains and emerges as a major cause of substantial improvements in the terms of trade.
Again. the whole paper is worth reading. I think I might be more interested in it because of my own work on Dutch colonialism in southeast Asia and the collapse of the Dutch East Indies Company (a state-sponsored monopoly). With that being said, the paper is one of those “big picture” reads that folks of all disciplines ought to be interested in.
One of the most interesting aspects I found in the paper had to do with foreign trade. It has become popular nowadays to focus on institutions within a society for explanations on why some nations are rich and others are poor. This paper suggests that while institutions may be important, it is just not institutions that are careful to include domestic factions that are important for prosperity. The institutions that are created to deal with foreign affairs (mostly trade and diplomacy) also play an important role in the health and wealth of societies. (h/t goes to co-blogger Claudio Shikida)
Around the Web: US-Iranian “Peace Accords” Edition
- Ezra Klein in the Washington Post
- Ed Krayewski in Reason
- John Allen Gay writing in the National Interest
- Daniel Larison in the American Conservative
- Stephen Walt has a great piece in Foreign Policy
- Angelo Codevilla on the Liberty Law blog
My own reaction is “great!”
This is fantastic news for everybody, including the Israelis. If the Israelis were smart, they’d jump on the opportunity and start forging ties with the Iranians again. Saudi Arabia, the state Israel is nudging closer and closer to, is the real terrorist factory in the Middle East and I don’t see how Israeli long-term interests would benefit from an alliance with the most vicious regime in the Arab world.
With that being said, I don’t know too many details about the deal. I know Tehran promised not to build a bomb (yeah right), but will sanctions end? If so, how soon?
To me sanctions are the most important issue here. Tehran getting a nuclear bomb is understandable given her neighborhood, so it’s not really a big deal when it gets the bomb. However, if sanctions are still around when Iran gets the bomb then you can bet Tehran is going to be much more bellicose than it is, and the people of Iran will give the regime the legitimacy it needs to wield its newfound power.
Around the Web
- John Locke, President Bush and the Jesus Pushers
- (More) on the legality of the latest ObamaCare fix
- Israel is wigging out; One of the fairest assessments of Israeli foreign policy I’ve seen since my own musings!
- Has Barack Obama told the biggest (dumbest) lie ever?
- Are real rates of return negative? Is the “natural” real rate of return negative?
Notes On Liberty 