Editor’s Pick. Guest post by Connor Boyack. Government is not abstract. I find that many people treat it like it is. This is evident in how they discuss a political issue. Here’s an example. “Marijuana should not be legalized.” This sounds so benign, yet it masks a number of disastrous consequences such a position requires.…
Tag: consequences
Ship-Jumping Libertarians
Editor’s Pick. Guest post by Robert Higgs. A message to former libertarians who jumped ship because of a perceived crisis (e.g., Islamist terrorism, immigrant “invasion,” Chinese driving the U.S. economy to ruin by flooding the country with cheap imports): You have forgotten, among other things, what you used to understand about the injustice and destructiveness…
Steve Patterson
Four years ago, I became an anarchist, and I’ve never looked back. My political philosophy now runs through my veins. But this wasn’t always the case. I used to be a young, apathetic conservative. Then, I was introduced to libertarianism, which slowly turned me into an anarchist. This might sound crazy, but I assure you, it’s quite reasonable, and many people share my same story.
False Dilemma
Nobody asked but … One of the reasons why a dilemma can be false is that life, in reality, seldom sorts itself into two distinct and mutually exclusive choices. The more classical definition of the false dilemma is where one person tries to convince another that the failure of A will certainly cause the advent…
Short vs Long, Opportunism, Just This Once
Send him mail. “Finding the Challenges” is an original column appearing every other Wednesday at Everything-Voluntary.com, by Verbal Vol. Verbal is a software engineer, college professor, corporate information officer, life long student, farmer, libertarian, literarian, student of computer science and self-ordering phenomena. Archived columns can be found here. FTC-only RSS feed available here. Because many…
Traffic Control, Beyond Control, On FTC
Send him mail. “Finding the Challenges” is an original column appearing every other Wednesday at Everything-Voluntary.com, by Verbal Vol. Verbal is a software engineer, college professor, corporate information officer, life long student, farmer, libertarian, literarian, student of computer science and self-ordering phenomena, pre-TSA world traveler, domestic traveler. Archived columns can be found here. FTC-only RSS…
A Secret Statist Decoder Ring
Nobody asked but … Here are some of my Facebook responses to a person who seemed to want man-made legislation, which he incorrectly calls “law”. The choice to do an evil happens at a concrete place while the formulation of a law is an abstraction, and the combination has at least two faults, 1) the…
How Goes the Whiskey Rebellion?
Nobody asked but … One of the negative consequences of collective action is that the desire for free lunch must collide with T.A.N.S.T.A.A.F.L. – There Ain’t No Such Thing as a Free Lunch. The Hamiltonian solution is taxes, which must be taken, even if violence is necessary, even if killing is necessary. The modern American…
Summer Invasion
Nobody asked but … I had thought that news of this cataclysm was generally known, but I found out in a recent Facebook squabble that it is not yet so. My wife and I and our neighbors must endure a home invasion in our little farming corner, annually. Hordes of uninvited guests cover our hillsides.…
Words Poorly Used #74 — Duty
When a person tells you it is your duty to [fill in the blank], that person is really trying to coerce you into relinquishing your future, for his or her own perceived benefit. Let’s say, for example, that someone says it is your duty to vote, that means you are being guilted into a collective…