Week of Vexing Individuals: Day Seven — Not Conservative?
From January 25-31, I’ve looked at individuals who somehow complicate our ideas about property rights or capitalism — in alphabetical order.
Libertarian economists Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek (the latter a Nobelist) may seem interchangeable to foes of the free market, but there are important differences. [...]
Week of Vexing Individuals: Day Six — Liberal?
From January 25-31, I’ll look at individuals who somehow complicate our ideas about property rights or capitalism — in alphabetical order.
It’s still assumed by most modern liberals that their philosophy and its representatives in Washington, DC aid “the little guy” — though Hillary Clinton is surely becoming Secretary [...]
Week of Vexing Individuals: Day Five — Libertarian?
From January 25-31, I’ll look at individuals who somehow complicate our ideas about property rights or capitalism — in alphabetical order.
The transcript part of today’s entry formerly appeared on Dawn Eden’s blog, with the title “Founded in Honor of Franklin, Confounded by Wild Tangents,” and is a [...]
Week of Vexing Individuals: Day Four — Leftist?
From January 25-31, I’ll look at individuals who somehow complicate our ideas about property rights or capitalism — in alphabetical order.
It’s Wednesday, and if you think “hump day” is rough for you, consider Zimbabwe, with its 231 million% inflation rate and massive, violent land expropriation under the dictatorial [...]
Week of Vexing Individuals: Day Three — Green?
From January 25-31, I’ll look at individuals who somehow complicate our ideas about property rights or capitalism — in alphabetical order.
It was an oddly capitalist chain of connections that led me to my Marxist friend, Sander Hicks. Through fellow libertarian Christine Caldwell Ames, who I’d known in [...]
Week of Vexing Individuals: Day Two — Conservative?
From January 25-31, I’ll look at individuals who somehow complicate our ideas about property rights or capitalism — in alphabetical order.
A shameful irony behind the Debates at Lolita Bar I host is that despite being organized by a property advocate, me, they grew out of meetings of the [...]
Week of Vexing Individuals: Day One — Anarchism and Beyond
From January 25-31, I’ll look at individuals who somehow complicate our ideas about property rights or capitalism — in alphabetical order.
I’ve read Derrida, Lacan, Foucault, etc. — and hated them all, arrogant anticapitalist obscurantists that they are, turning vague whining about the culture into pseudo-arguments on [...]
Property adherence offers about as clear-cut a means of deciding individual legal disputes and collective policy disputes as humanity can plausibly engineer — and one tending, not coincidentally, toward utility- enhancing, decentralized, individual-freedom-respecting outcomes.
I may be guilty of assuming all the libertarians I’ve talked to over the years realized this and so had the property [...]
I planned to stop reading comics before but was surprised to find them getting closer to the finale I always imagined and wanted to see — which was basically an unlikely but hoped-for simultaneous “ending” (I mean, at least semi-permanently) to the stories of the Multiverse, New Gods, Time Trapper, Krona, and maybe Gog to [...]
A few unrelated observations from the world of entertainment, seen through the lens of property-adherence:
•I thought this story sounded a lot more exciting when I thought the headline was describing some sort of crime ring instead of science-thwarting noise: “Shhh! Gadget Racket Threatens Pulsar Research.”
(On a completely unrelated science note, shouldn’t Nova be planning [...]
I mentioned yesterday seeing property rights as the set of rules generated by an underlying, foundational ethos of utilitarianism, the desire to maximize happiness for all relevant agents.
And since just asking people to wing it and make off-the-cuff predictions about what would increase happiness would likely produce chaos, we rule utilitarians look for rules that, [...]
To connect a few dots from earlier entries: say what you will about property rights as a candidate for a “metaethic” (of sorts, anyway, though it’s merely the output of a background rule utilitarianism), you have to admit it at least makes legal rules concrete enough to enforce with relative clarity and ease.
If you want [...]
As Obama said in his speech at the Lincoln Memorial, people ought to be judged by the content of their character, not by race, so, historic a milestone as today may be, I hope the press and public will soon get down to the business of scrutinizing Obama’s policies as closely as they would, oh, [...]
Yesterday, I corrected a typo that I noticed in one of this blog’s first entries, from two years ago (a review of a book by Brian Doherty, who also wrote one of last week’s Book Selections), and that typo led me free-associatively to ten musings that warrant a book-length explanation. I’m slowly working on [...]
Cheap by comparison with Obama’s stimulus spending plans, the original New Deal remains something about which many people are more enthusiastic than they are about the sort of radical capitalist vision I discussed yesterday. Adam Cohen of the New York Times even wrote a ludicrous editorial recently lamenting that the problem with the New [...]