Category: The Goal is Freedom

A couple of billion people in the developing world lack modern fuels and electricity. This kills such people prematurely, among other reasons, because they cook and heat their homes with wood and animal excrement, which create deadly indoor air pollution. They lack access to modern cheap, reliable, and potentially clean energy (that is, fossil fuels) because their governments create obstacles and arrogant Western politicians egged on by rich social activists block their access–without justification but much irony–in the name of protecting the planet.

When I see four of those yard signs on my morning walk, I chuckle. If I’m in a mischievous mood I might someday suggest a couple of memes that the owners might add. I could embrace all of those memes, but not without some qualification and in several cases, a good deal of qualification. But […]

I don’t know if we’re in the heyday of questioning the motives of people we disagree with rather than simply rebutting them–character assassination, that is–but it’s got me wondering why this is such a popular pastime these days.

Risk is integral to life, social life included. As Thomas Sowell puts it, there are no solutions, only trade-offs–you can’t do only one thing. So each of us does cost-benefit analyses all the time in everyday life.

Before we can decide whether something is good or bad, we need a standard. Good for what or whom? Moreover, in environmental matters it makes a difference whether you see mankind as an invader and destroyer of benignly stable nature or as a species that flourishes by taming often dangerously volatile nature, that is, making it a safer, more hospitable place.

President Biden has reversed himself under pressure from his progressive flank and has given the go-ahead for a new moratorium on renter evictions throughout most of the United States for individuals making up to $99,000 a year (couples, $198,000). The twist is that Biden acknowledges that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which reports to his secretary of health and human services, has no legal authority for the action.

One of the least mysterious things in life is why the government grows. The better question is why it ever shrinks.

My purpose here is not to defend or deny any particular scientific position but to question the model of science that the loudest self-declared believers in science seem to work from. Their model makes science seem almost identical to what they mean by, and attack as, religion. If that’s the case, we ought not to listen to them when they lecture the rest of us about heeding science.

The government’s K-12 schools–aka “public schools”–are once again a battleground on which a bitter dispute is playing out. Wait!–once again? The government’s schools have been a battleground since their inception in the 19th century. Since that’s where the children are, how could it have been otherwise? For an institution that was supposed to produce social unity, it’s done the exact opposite.

When a libertarian says that the most basic individual right is the right not to be aggressed against, a clever interlocutor may accuse the libertarian of begging the question, of stuffing the rabbit into the hat. The trick, the critic will say, is in the word aggress: libertarians allegedly rig the game by restricting the category of aggression to only the actions they disapprove of, thereby institutionalizing many corrupt activities.