The official Everything-Voluntary.com blog.
(My Eastern New Mexico News column for June 30, 2021)
You are smart enough to know a hammer is the wrong tool for driving a screw. Yes, It can work in an emergency, but it isn’t best and can cause future problems. Either use a screwdriver for the scre…
Because I care about you, I want you to be armed at all times. Just in case. That’s the loving, civilized position to adopt with regard to my fellow human beings.
Whether it’s yesterday’s battles over prayer in school or today’s conflicts over critical race theory, public schooling causes people to fight. It’s a struggle between values and viewpoints that ends with one group imposing its will upon others. The curriculum that is adopted or the one that is shunned inevitably creates winners and losers.
“Gun control” [sic] is anti-science. It is superstition. It is historical ignorance, technological ignorance, and sociological ignorance. It is racist, sexist, and government-supremacist. It is antisocial. It doesn’t make anyone but the bad guys safer. Senile Grampa Joe embodies all of this and more (as has every president before him).
Like Sullivan, I am well-aware aware that human beings routinely claim to place supreme value on culture, identity, community, and so on. Unlike Sullivan, however, I refuse to take such hyperbolic claims at face value. Actions really do speak louder than words. And the vast majority of people who claim to place supreme value on culture, identity, or community show otherwise with their deeds.
Strictly speaking, liberty isn’t the solution to problems. It’s what creates the framework in which solutions can be discovered. That is an important distinction because it reminds us that advocates of full-blown liberty do not offer the world a problem-free society but “only” a society in which problems are discovered and problem-solvers are mobilized as quickly, fairly, and efficiently as impossible.
(My Eastern New Mexico News column for June 23, 2021)
You are responsible for yourself. No one else can be as responsible for yourself as you are, nor can you ever be completely responsible for anyone but yourself. Please do your best in the case of b…
No capitalist gets our money unless we voluntarily choose to exchange it for whatever he’s selling. As Mitchell puts it, “Capitalism is the only system that gives people the liberty to make their own choices.”
Suppose you’re very power-hungry. Do you want people to think they’re able to fix their own problems? Of course not. If individuals can help themselves by doing a good job, learning new skills, making friends, and keeping their eyes peeled, what do they need you for?
American leaders and their loyal media pundits love to sit in judgment of other countries’ election, declaring them fair or rigged according to their seemingly meticulous standards. In fact, the real standard is that the regimes “we” like hold free and fair (enough) elections, while the regimes “we” dislike don’t. What about regimes “we” like that hold no elections at all, like Saudi Arabia? They are forgotten whenever the loveliness of democracy is the topic of discussion.