As a rule, the candidates for election to public office make vague promises, hardly any of which are subject to straightforward monitoring or quantitative measurement. In general, it is impossible for principals in the electorate to identify precisely how their office-holding agents have succeeded or failed.
Tag: action
Who Will Crush Others
Americans and many others hold, in the greatest esteem, something they call democracy. But this type of government is not democracy—direct rule by “the people”—but representative republicanism, wherein people’s “representatives” make decisions that are binding (i.e., enforced by violence and threats of violence) on everyone.
The Structure of Your Principles
Part of the challenge of lifelong learning is to understand that the goal is not to add to your collection of “well what do you know’s”, but to assimilate your new knowledge with the creation of, revisiting, modification of, or withdrawing (shedding) from your current set of principles. It does one no good to regard new information as just “interesting,” one needs to test that new learning against the structure, the principles, of one’s information system.
Abortion: A Voluntaryist Perspective
From the moment an egg is fertilized, there is a living cell with a unique set of human DNA. That is — scientifically — a human life. However, science cannot answer questions of morality on its own; that is the realm of ethics and philosophy and religion. Here, we consider the moral question from the Voluntaryist standpoint.
Everyone Misses This Lesson on Political Power From “Game of Thrones”
Getting a seat on the Iron Throne is a pretty raw deal, and even if you have it, you might now have it for long. So why do Game of Thrones‘s rulers spill so much blood to get there? Why not consolidate their own power elsewhere? And why does the question of who sits in leadership draw so many other people into the sinkhole of war?
Net of the Long Knives? Neutrality Advocates Put it in Reverse
On July 12, a number of prominent companies joined in the “Internet-wide Day of Action to Save Net Neutrality.” Among them were GoDaddy, Namecheap, Google, and CloudFlare. All four companies issued pious statements about the dangerous possibility of Internet Service Providers cutting off access to perfectly legal content. A little more than a month later, all four companies (and others) are themselves doing exactly what they warned us ISPs might do unless a “Net Neutrality” law forbade it: They’re cutting off access to perfectly legal content (yes, neo-Nazi speech is legal in America).
Get Your Own House in Order First
Before making a big deal of someone else’s actions, it’s a good idea to look in the mirror. You might be surprised by what you see.
Political Action Exacerbates the Problem of Hate
Politics is your neighbor and his like-minded friends rallying together to lobby for government to shift their policies in their favor. If your neighbor and his friends hate intrusive government, those policy shifts may be a good thing for those who value peace and prosperity. But if your neighbor and his friends hate people wealthier than them, or people with a different skin color, those policy shifts are sure to bring about an exacerbated level of conflict, and thus a reduction in prosperity.
Charlottesville Haters: Test Case for the Internet as Public Square
John Gilmore famously noted that “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” Libertarians like me view the market in much the same way. This situation is a practical, nuts and bolts test of those views. There’s a great deal riding on the outcome.
Economics Helps You Deal with Difficult People
You wake up to the realization that you have an important meeting in 30 minutes. You leap out of bed, throw some clothes on, grab your keys, and rush out the door. You’re halfway to your car when you see it.
It’s not a moment of zen, but of economics.
Somebody has slashed your tires.