Protectionism

Check out the preamble to a new directive that was recently issued by Argentina’s Customs authority, AFIP: “Given the need to strengthen the means of control necessary to detect and investigate commercial fraud cases, especially those involving understated values for imported merchandise which cause grave damage to the national economy through the avoidance of import [...]

Nonsense in the News

Brazil Brews New Law Against Exodus of Football PlayersBrazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva reiterated recently his preoccupation about the exodus of football talents, saying that a new law is under discussion to brake this trend. In an interview published Sunday by the daily O Estado de Sao Paulo, Lula pointed out that the [...]

Wasting Your Vote

I’m planning to attend the Ron Paul Texas Straw Poll rally this Friday. It should be interesting, to say the least. Ron Paul is the Republican “dark horse” candidate whose campaign has been roundly ignored by most media pundits because they’ve already decided he can’t possibly win. They may well be right. After all, Ron [...]

Give Me Liberty (But You, Not So Much)

I asked a friend of mine to take a couple of political quizzes. He scored Neocon Republican on the first quiz, but Libertarian on the second. I told him that he was clearly a very confused individual. His response was, “Not really. I think that I should be free to do whatever I want, but [...]

The Illusion of the Competitive Monopoly

I’ve been discussing politics with a die-hard Republican friend of mine, and we’ve covered a wide range of topics, including public education and the Civil War. These may seem to be completely unrelated issues, but I was able to glean a common thread from our discussion of both.
On the issue of public schools, my allegedly [...]

Loving Leviathan

Our founding fathers created a government that was based on a Lockean, not a Hobbesian, foundation. To paraphrase Hobbes, we have absolute liberty in a state of nature, but life in such a state is “nasty, brutish, and short.” People therefore give up their liberty entirely in exchange for the protective services provided by government [...]

Better Right Than Popular

As I mentioned in an earlier blog entry, libertarians are a strange mix of self-confidence and pessimism. Today I’m more pessimistic than ever. The Fort Worth City Council voted overwhelmingly, though not surprisingly, to ban smoking in private businesses throughout the city. There were two council members who did stand on principle to vote against [...]

The Broken Window

The idea that the government can take taxpayer money and then use it to “create” anything (wealth, jobs, hydrogen cars, etc.) is an example of the fallacy of the broken window. This comes from an economic essay written by Frederic Bastiat titled What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen. Here’s the Cliffs Notes version [...]

Public Education

We’re told that education is “too important” to be left to the market or that people have “a right to” education. In fact, we believe in our public school system so much that we’re willing to take your house away if you don’t go along with the program. Because we care about the children.
Ridiculous. My [...]

Projection

I wonder how much of the resistance to freedom is due to projection. Some conversations I’ve had lately lead me to believe that people extrapolate the shortcomings of existing statist solutions to the private sector, and see nothing but heartache in any attempt to unleash capitalism as a means to solve problems. It usually goes [...]