The Mumbai terror attack

The terrorists killed over a hundred innocent people yesterday. This wasn’t an act that took place in some distant part of the world. It happened in a city I care about, one that I have spent four summers in and where many of my friends live or have family. The attack was astounding in its [...]

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Blogging without obligation

I could give many (true) reasons for the lack of substantial posts over the last eight days or so: I have been travelling, I have been applying for postdoc jobs, I have been very busy otherwise. But why bother explaining myself when I can point to blogging without obligation?
(Hat Tip: A commenter in QI’s blog)

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Atlas Shrugged updated

Click here to read an updated version of Atlas Shrugged in light of the current financial crisis..
(Hat Tip: Marginal Revolution)

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Geithner, Summers and Romer

Barack Obama’s economics appointees have been great so far. Indeed, from my viewpoint, they represent the very best of the realistic possibilities. The triumvirate of Geithner, Summers and Romer are all qualified, smart, have an excellent grasp of the issues and most significantly, none of them subscribe to the kind of protectionist, far-left ideology that [...]

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A corny short story I wrote seven years ago

I wrote a short story (“Middling”) sometime in early 2002 (or late 2001?) that I remember not being particularly pleased with. It was one of many results of a period when I tried my hand at fiction and poetry; doesn’t everyone go through such a phase? But anyway, I think it was a bad story. [...]

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“A childish piece of theater”

A professor at UC Irvine refuses to take sexual harassment sensitivity classes. Here’s why:
First of all, I believe the training is a disgraceful sham. As far as I can tell from my colleagues, it is worthless, a childish piece of theater, an insult to anyone with a respectable IQ, primarily designed to relieve the university [...]

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Coercing eHarmony

It is a sign of how far anti-discrimination laws have gone when a dating website is sued for not including homosexuals in the matchmaking service. I completely agree with Jacob Sullum:
In a settlement with the New Jersey Attorney General’s Office, the online dating service eHarmony, until now limited to heterosexuals, has agreed to start matching men [...]

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The stupidity button

Sometimes, Tyler Cowen is in a class of his own.
Via Angus (and do read his snark on TFP), here is Paul Samuelson:
Libertarians are not just bad emotional cripples. They are also bad advice givers.
[...] When I see people writing sentences of this kind, I imagine them pressing a little button which makes them temporarily less [...]

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Britain wants to make it illegal to pay for sex

Britain, where prostitution is now legal, wants to turn back the clock and criminalize it again. And like the Swedish, they have taken a bizarre but politically correct position — it will now be illegal to pay for sex but legal to sell it.
As Home Secretary Jacqui Smith put it:

Basically, if it means fewer people [...]

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Some good advice for Barack Obama

Radley Balko has some unsolicited — and thoughtful — advice for the new president elect.
Even if Barack does just one (any one) of the things Radley suggests, it will be wonderful.

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The personal is not the political

1.
And the moral is not the legal.
It is a distinction that often seems to be lost. Admittedly, most people, when faced with the distasteful, the unpleasant or the unfair have a natural impulse to ‘ban it’. That is an emotional response. As we grow up, we learn to separate the emotional from the rational. Libertarianism [...]

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Feuding libertarians

I would not be doing my job as a libertarian blogger if I did not link to the blog war between Todd Seavey on the one hand and Kerry Howley/Will Wilkinson on the other (with minor roles played by Helen Rittelmeyer and Julian Sanchez). The best link (in the sense that it points to almost [...]

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Musical bliss

I received the 100 Best Opera Classics in the mail today!

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The war against AIDS (we have almost won it)

There is still no cure for AIDS, but science has come a long way towards controlling it. Antiretroviral therapy has progressed so much in the last two decades that, according to current reports, a person who started taking the drugs at age 20 will on average live another 43 years.
And we can expect the science [...]

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Blackmail, libertarianism and the law

A post over at the Art of The Possible asking for libertarian perspectives on blackmail law morphs into an interesting discussion on private property, coercion, reputation and related philosophical issues.
I have detailed my position on blackmail law and related issues in the comment thread linked above, so I will not expound on it here. However [...]

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