Supporters of foreign aid love to point out that it constitutes less than 1% of the federal budget. True, but that 1% comes with lots of strings attached for both parties.
Tag: voting
If You Don’t Trust People, Then You Shouldn’t Trust Politics
“Ordinary people can’t be trusted to make the right decisions about what’s best for themselves and others. That’s why we need government to decide for them.”
The Collision of Two Irreversible Trends
The state huffing and puffing, harassing, demonizing and assaulting people, even outright state-sanctioned murder, has absolutely no chance of reversing or stopping this trend. You can sometimes temporarily scare someone into being obedient, but thuggery is not going to make voluntaryists magically believe in political “authority” again.
A Pizza Problem: Why Those Third Party Polls Don’t Pan Out
Plurality or majority support for a generic third party in principle is not the same thing as plurality or majority support for a specific third party in the voting booth. In practice, most voters who say they want a third party end up voting Republican or Democrat, or just not voting. Why?
Why It Matters Whodunit
On reflection, though, whodunit is tremendously important. Why? Because in our society, the routine reaction to mass murder is to try to punish millions of innocent people. In a just society, mass murderers’ group identity wouldn’t matter.
Disobedience is a Virtue
When we spend most of our formative years being bombarded with the message—from parents, teachers, the media, agents of the state, etc.—that obedience is a virtue and disobedience is a sin, we “learn” that lie at a very deep psychological level, way beyond merely an intellectual understanding.
Lysander Spooner Quote #21
By my reading, Spooner is opposed to “quanto-cracy” in any form. There are no mathematical paths to freedom, except those dealing with the individual’s voluntary relationship with each other individual, directly, in their scope of action.
A Poor Politician
In truth, the only way to curb political corruption is to drastically reduce the scope of government. Only when the politicians have nothing with which to be corrupt will they stop being corrupt.
Secession / Unification
Nobody asked but … I know how I feel relative to the problem in Catalonia. I favor Catalonian Independence. But it makes me really examine how I feel about separatist situations in general. I look first at the situation with the province of Ulster in Ireland, a province that was broken out and retained by…
Is Secession by Referendum Libertarian?
My concerns about group (not individual) secession are over the process of peaceful separation, namely, the referendum. Libertarians have long criticized political democracy — that is, the settling of “public” matters by majority vote either directly or through so-called representatives — as inherently violative of individual rights. By what authority does a majority lord it over a minority? Well, doesn’t this critique apply to referenda on secession?