Pardoning Assange Would be the First Step Back Toward Rule of Law

On April 11, the ongoing saga of journalist and transparency activist Julian Assange took a dangerous turn.  Ecuador’s president, Lenin Moreno, revoked his asylum in that country’s London embassy. British police immediately arrested him — supposedly pursuant to his “crime” of jumping bail on an invalid arrest warrant in an investigation since dropped without charges but, as they admitted shortly thereafter,  actually with the intent of turning him over to US prosecutors on bogus “hacking” allegations.

Anarchy Just Is

Statists and ancoms, too often, ask, “How does anarchy work?” or “How does your version of anarchy work?”  They somehow think that because I am an anarchist that I am obligated to explain it to them as a system, like a tractor or ice cream.  I am under no such obligation — in fact, my own conception of anarchy evolves from day to day.

The Government is Hard at Work Keeping Tax Preparation Complicated and Expensive

“Congressional Democrats and Republicans,” reports ProPublica, “are moving to permanently bar the IRS from creating a free electronic tax filing system.” Specifically, the  House Ways and Means Committee just advanced a bill perversely called the “Taxpayers First Act.”  If passed by Congress and signed into law, it would become illegal for the IRS to “compete” with private sector tax preparation services like H&R Block and Intuit (the owners of TurboTax) by allowing taxpayers to skip those middlemen.

Giving Up on Alchemy

I could be wrong, but I suspect alchemy gradually evolved into science because of alchemists keeping the stuff that worked and tossing out the stuff that didn’t. The magic failed, but the occasional experiment succeeded, It was a process. No one intended to abandon alchemy; it just happened over time. In a parallel way, politics is alchemy; libertarianism is science.

Awareness Often First Step Towards Liberty

Harriet Tubman, the 19th Century abolitionist, is quoted as saying, “I freed a thousand slaves. I could have freed more if only they knew they were slaves.” It’s the libertarian’s dilemma. People don’t like to notice their chains even when that’s about all it would take to break them. It’s too painful to admit they aren’t as free as they should be, so they don’t.