As the FCC considers repealing the 2015 Net Neutrality rule, its supporters are desperate to associate bad things with its absence. So desperate that Demand Progress is advertising examples of Net Neutrality as violations of Net Neutrality.
Tag: history
Influences III
If I were a guest on a podcast or an interview broadcast, when asked about my major influences, I would stick close to the names repeated by voluntaryists — Spooner, Bastiat, Jefferson, Mencken, Mises, Hazlitt, Rothbard, Higgs, and Woods. But in this more expansive context, I can stretch out to discuss the influences who made me a voluntaryist before I knew I was one, before I knew to read the internal literature of the voluntaryist, libertarian, individualist mainstream. Three such influences are Alan Turing, Dan Carlin, and Ruth Rendell.
Blaming Progress for So-Called Inequality
It’s bad enough when liberals are Luddites, but it’s far worse when they’re anti-tech because not everyone can have it. If they had their way, never mind cell phones or flat-screen TVs: they’d have torn down the first hut that anyone built, demanding that it be available to all instead of just the few.
Immigration and Social Engineering
Social engineers of all parties and persuasions talk as though an economy is some kind of mechanism to be centrally fine-tuned and overhauled occasionally according to a plan. Even those who style themselves free enterprisers display the central-planning mentality when it comes to immigration.
The Master of All Mistakes
All of the adverse domino effects that have placed the human race in its current dangerous position can be traced back to one cause—the acceptance of coercion as the method for solving societal problems. It’s so obvious that hardly anyone sees it or wants to see it.
In U.S. Universities, a Divorce Is Needed
If the worthwhile parts of the U.S. universities are to continue to thrive, or even to survive as serious endeavors, it would seem that a parting of the ways must come. The STEM fields must separate themselves from the bullshit parts of the universities. The latter can then go their own way to fester in their nonsense until the general public awakens to the need to cease supporting such activities altogether.
A Moral Obligation to Pay and Obey Me
I’m a human being and you’re a human being. However, as the result of some rituals that other people did, and things being written on paper–which you don’t need to understand the details of, and which you didn’t need to be involved in–you now have a moral obligation to give me money and obey my commands.
What the Left Should Like about Public Choice
Although the public choice school of political economy has been demonized in a new work of putatively progressive fiction masquerading as intellectual history, good-faith leftists (if they don’t already regard themselves as libertarians) may be surprised by how their cause could benefit from the insights of James Buchanan, et al.
A Kind Word on Behalf of the Mexicans
They are in the great majority of cases good and decent people seeking what most people seek—an opportunity to work toward building a better life for themselves and their children. For those of us who know them more intimately than most, it is painful to hear the ignorant and malicious statements that circulate about them, especially perhaps on social media, where people are frequently unrestrained in letting loose the most vitriolic and baseless accusations.
Why I (Still) Blog
The liberty-lover family is facing tough times. We will make it through; we always have throughout history. But the near future will probably be hard and not all of us will make it to the better times beyond that.