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Regarding Rothbard’s Betrayal of the Old Right, David Gorden writes: “Things weren’t always like this. In the years before World War II, American conservatives opposed global crusading. The Old Right opposed the New Deal and favored the traditional American policy of not getting involved in foreign wars.” There was also a british empire that controlled…

William Tell, came from the town of Bürglen, and was known as a strong man and an expert shot with the crossbow. In his time, the Habsburg emperors of Austria were seeking control of Uri. Albrecht Gessler, the newly appointed Austrian Vogt of Altdorf, raised a pole in the village’s central square, hung his hat…

This is the best plan that any candidate has put forward. Of course I would love to see a purely libertarian platform. But if I can’t have that (and it’s pretty certain that I cant) a classical liberal platform that allows me to protect my liberty will have to do. TOPICS 1. The Economy 2.…

He frames the argument as pragmatic: In Eastern and Western philosophy there are two forces usually at work against one another which (it is assumed) helps bring balance to the world. In Asian philosophy it is the conflict between Yin and Yang. In Christianity the conflict is between the ideas of Thomas Aquinas and Augustine…

(POSTED ON THE NYT) I suggested in my earlier essay that philosophy so conceived is best classified as a science, because of its rigor, technicality, universality, falsifiability, connection with other sciences, and concern with the nature of objective being (among other reasons). I did not claim, however, that it is an empirical science, like physics…

I’ll have to ask him if I get the chance.

In a rare break from party infighting, Monday’s Republican primary debate saw the candidates unite in their derision of “ObamaContent,” the president’s newly unveiled theory of linguistic meaning.  The theory, which relies upon the practice of a speaker’s linguistic community to fix the semantic content of many words, was attacked as “socialized meaning” by the debate participants. via…

That’s for sure. Never. Because it was a boom. We will finally get back to making things. 🙂

“The conservative strategy is to starve the beast as the only hope of preserving their freedom and their culture. In that context, their approach is entirely rational: in the battle between the public intellectual who would undermine their culture, and the entrepreneur who would preserve it, they are funding the entrepreneur. It is an entirely…

So the answer is pretty obvious. Canadians act like happy people, because they are. They live privileged lives in a privileged country. How else should they act? It’s odd. I can walk around Moscow, Paris, Istanbul, or rural Hungary and understand the cultural signals people are using. Why is it that Canadian signaling is so…

Part I. Observations About The Comments Part II. Comments from Metafilter PART I. OBSERVATIONS ABOUT THE COMMENTS 1) Religion European atheism is tied to the desire of the emerging middle class to sieze economic power, political power, and social status from the church. The USA never had the relationship between the aristocracy and the church,…

via Philosophy by Another Name – NYTimes.com. I would like to launch the Campaign for Renaming Philosophy (C.R.P.) — or perhaps more accurately, the Campaign for Renaming Academic Philosophy (which has a less attractive abbreviation). I suggest meeting with other philosophers informally to discuss the question and forming small groups of people dedicated to the…

Science consists of a network of externally testable hypotheses.Scientific statements are testable because the physical universe is internally consistent, and because of that consistency, subject to fixed categories that are reducible to numbers which can be manipulated by the process of ratios we call mathematics. As such, the physical universe is extremely simple compared to…

via This is Really Why the Economy Is Looking Up(Snarky) « Modeled Behavior. I remember some folks telling me that the Lehman bankruptcy would be no biggie. [Whaaaat? “That’s how capitalism works!”], they said. Seems they are right. You declare bankruptcy and badabing-badaboom a little over three years later everything is cleared up. Easy peasy.…

via Yes, They DO Hate the Constitution! « ACGR's "News with Attitude". I hate to stomp on bunnies, but nonsense like this doesn’t do our movement any good: However, her  fellow Justice, the supposedly ultra-conservative and strict constructionist Antonin Scalia is quoted as saying “The bill of rights of the former evil empire, the Union…

I’ve been criticized today about my support for war. As a libertarian my tolerance for violence makes me an outlier. But I have no problem with war — at all. The war against Saddam was not a problem for me assuming that it was to create a base from which we could topple the Iranian…

As a followup to my criticism of The American Conservative’s position on Iran, The National Review’s David French http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/292767/legal-case-striking-iran-david-french states: There has, in fact, been an “armed attack” against the United States. Iran has been waging a low-intensity war against America and Israel — both directly and by proxy — for more than two decades.…

Every society contains a population which together, as shareholders, possess a portfolio of norms, a portfolio of opportunities, and a portfolio of capital. When we tolerate something, it means that we are willing to bear the knowing theft, involuntary transfer, or privatization of some small part of those portfolios that we would expect other members…

via The American Conservative » Netanyahu Calls the Shots. We are seeing something awful unfolding before our very eyes – an essentially phony case for going to war being driven by a foreign country and its domestic lobby with the political class too terrified to say no and a complicit media beating the drum. Philip…

via Everything Wrong With The Libertarian Movement, Part 1 on United Liberty by Jeremy Kolassa Jeremy criticizes the Mises Institute (as I sometimes do as well) for its supposedly anti-collective rhetoric: Mainly: a) Unable to accept intellectual property rights b) Unable to accept that anarcho-capitalism does not work in the real world c) A penchant…