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.
Tag: politics
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.
War Crimes and the Long Run
In politics, the masses are highly impulsive. They favor whatever feels good at the moment; medium- and long-run effects are usually too dull and remote to contemplate. Elites, however, often want to claim the mantle of credibility – and deride their opponents’ short-sightedness.
How an Airborne Ranger Became a Voluntaryist
Government directives to do evil (whether by commission or omission) do not override our conscience and our understanding of right and wrong. I favor agoristic obviation of government institutions. I support voluntary alternatives to government services as much as I can and continue to encourage government institutions to reduce and eliminate their restrictions on our freedoms.
Law as a Tool to Get What We Want
Imports threatening domestic production? Raise tariffs! Cheap labor threatening labor unions? Enact a minimum wage! Businessmen without scruples ripping off easy prey? Occupational licensure! Boogeyman at the front door? Increase the “defense” budget! Your neighbor is sodomizing his friend in the privacy of his home? Ban all the gays!
Liberty is Not About Politics
Politics is a distraction from the message and the philosophy of Liberty. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what politicians do or don’t do. It doesn’t matter which figurehead gets replaced by which lackey. Politics is the bread and circuses of our time.
Episode 074 – Russ’s Journey, Part One: Politics (51m)
Episode 074 welcomes Russ Fugal to the podcast in a two part conversation with Skyler and Morgan. The topics covered in this first part include smartphones, career moves, Russ’s childhood homeschooling, his unchanging degree of conservatism during the 9/11 crisis period, Ron Paul and the 2008 and 2012 elections, environmentalism, his evolution toward libertarianism and anarchism, “Who would Jesus incarcerate?”, voluntary prisons, and the country’s Wizard of Oz moment c/o of Donald Trump.
Tailor Your Ideology Into Relevance
PROPOSITION: Until libertarians tailor their ideology and their actions to accommodate the common people’s nativism, nationalism, ethnic bigotry, and support for U.S. imperialism abroad and police brutality at home, they can never gain enough adherents to become a serious factor in American political life.
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.
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.