Gary Johnson

I often write about politicians running for office but I am rarely really excited about any of them. (When I say really excited, I mean excited enough to donate serious money, and passionately hope, and perhaps volunteer, and do everything else I can to help them win.) A little clarification here: I am talking of [...]

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A doomed alliance?

A pretty fair article by Ed Kilgore on the widening rift between progressives and libertarians. One mini-saga of the past decade in American politics has been the flirtation—with talk of a deeper partnership—between progressives and libertarians. These two groups were driven together, in the main, by common hostility to huge chunks of the Bush administration’s [...]

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The oldest libertarian debate

Todd Seavey and Kerry Howley (joined by Dan MacCarthy) continue their debate of whether libertarianism should include concern for more than just property rights. Its an old debate, one that Seavey and Howley have had in the past in their respective blogs, and one I have commented on extensively earlier, so there’s nothing much to [...]

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Utopia and reality

Will Wikinson says: Yet I hear again and again that, since the state should not be in the business of marriage, one should not, as a libertarian, have an opinion about how this business is to be carried out. Increasingly, I find this an obnoxious and shameful form of moral recusal. One cannot use an [...]

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Violence, State and Consent: A more lengthy discussion

(Followup to Domestic violence and consent) In this post, I intend to discuss and clarify some issues related to violence and consent. For the most part, I will take for granted the libertarian philosophy of non-interference in any consensual act and explore some of the ramifications of this position with regard to acts of domestic [...]

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Harry Browne’s New Year resolutions

Since the new year is still young, I thought I’d share Harry Browne’s New Year’s Resolutions from 2000. Harry, who passed away in 2006, was the Libertarian candidate for President in 1996 and 2000. He was renowned as a superb communicator and one of the most persuasive advocates for individual liberty and this excellent list [...]

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The personal is not the political, contd.

(Post updated) In my earlier post on this theme, I expressed my opposition to using coercive legal means to advance social goals and my moral abhorrence for laws which censor expression, ban consensual behavior or limit freedom of association. I wrote: Any rational system of morality that makes the basic libertarian distinction between the personal [...]

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If you wish to donate for liberty, where should you?

If you wish to effectively advance liberty — yes the kind of liberty that I talk about in this blog — or just make a real difference to the life of someone in need, who should you donate to? Check out this great list by Radley Balko. Liberty can thrive only if people who care [...]

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Two countries, different attitudes.

I came across this interesting news article today about how liberal prostitution laws are encouraging young Swedes to make a short trip to Denmark. In Sweden paying for sex is a crime punishable with a possible six-month jail sentence or a hefty income-linked fine. Perhaps the worst penalty for errant Swedish males is the official [...]

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Libertarian quotes

(Post updated) I haven’t had time to post much of late but here are excerpts from two posts today that express accurately what I feel about those matters. Isn’t the internet great? Todd Seavey on why the ambiguity of property rights at the boundaries does not mean that the concept becomes less important or that [...]

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The libertarian moment?

The latest issue of Reason magazine has a long op-ed titled “The Libertarian moment.” Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie make the case that we are at the threshold of a new age of freedom. They cite as evidence relaxing social norms, increased permissiveness and the `soft libertarianism’ that the internet age has spawned. I would [...]

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The case for limited government

In the aftermath of the Mumbai attacks, Ramesh Srivats explains, in a long but very readable post, why our unrealistically high expectations of what the government ought to do for us leads to a bloated maai-baap sarkar that loves to intrude into matters that are not its business, yet fails to perform its most basic [...]

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The libertarian vice

I came across this old post by Tyler Cowen today: The libertarian vice is to assume that the quality of government is fixed.  The libertarian also argues that the quality of government is typically low, and this is usually the bone of contention, but that is not the point I wish to consider.  Often that [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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