What’s the best case against war crimes trials? Simple: War crimes trials might delay peace – or reignite a war – and war is hell. Indeed, war is often hellish enough to overcome the intuitive moral presumption in favor of making violent criminals suffer for their misdeeds. When countries adopt amnesties to prevent future bloodshed, I keep my mind open.
Tag: logic
The Fallacy Fallacy Redux
Just because someone argues about a thing by using a logic fallacy does not make the thing itself untrue. In fact, citing your antagonist’s logic slip, then claiming victory thereby is just another instance of the appeal to authority. The authority in this case are the tandem of your fallacy guru and your argumentation guru.
The Broader Effects of Trade and Tech
My personal view is that the broad social effects of international trade, technological progress, and immigration are all, on balance, positive. For immigration, I’ve done my homework; for trade and tech, however, I’m only guessing.
Historically Hollow: The Cries of Populism
The populists of our Golden Age are loud and furious. They’re crying about “monopolies” that deliver firehoses worth of free stuff. They’re bemoaning the “death of competition” in industries (like taxicabs) that governments forcibly monopolized for as long as any living person can remember.
What Does Aggregated Information Mean?
There’s another crypto bull run going on, after a long ‘crypto winter’. No one really knows why the prices are climbing, though everyone will do their best to figure it out and tell you. There’s nothing that has really changed since the last big run up and dip. In fact, the brand leader BTC has arguably gotten technologically less feasible since then.
£s for Brexit
Since I think that Brexit is a bad idea, why am I telling its advocates how to proceed? Because I know Brexiteers won’t listen – and even if they did, the EU wouldn’t budge. While I can understand the failures of politics, I have near-zero ability to solve them. Not coincidentally, this is precisely what my view predicts.
100 Reasons to Homeschool Your Kids
This is my 100th article for FEE.org, so here are 100 reasons to homeschool your kids!
Why is Immigration a “Contentious Issue in Classical Liberalism”?
“Contentious Issues in Classical Liberalism” was the theme of this year’s Mont Pelerin Society. This gave me a chance to explore a major puzzle: Sociologically, immigration clearly deserves to be on the agenda. After all, many people otherwise sympathetic to human freedom and free markets support even more immigration restrictions than we already have. Intellectually, however, it’s hard to see why.
Today’s Schools Are Yesterday’s Streetcars: How Technology Will Transform Education
We can predict the future of education by glimpsing the past of transportation. Fueled by technological innovation, namely electricity, streetcars gradually replaced the horse-and-buggy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, followed by mass-produced automobiles that ultimately toppled the streetcar.
American Militias after the Civil War: From Black Codes to the Black Panthers and Beyond
The Civil War (1861-1865) was nothing less than a revolutionary reorganization of American government, society, and economics. It claimed almost as many lives as every other U.S. conflict combined and, by war’s bloody logic, forged the nation which the Founding Fathers could not by settling once and for all lingering national questions about state sovereignty and slavery.