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Liberty and Power

  • Aug 4, 2006

    Eminent Domain and Other Corporate Welfare

    by Liberty and Power

    Driving south on I-65 through Alabaster, Alabama, last week, I noticed a sprawling new shopping center on my left. Wal-Mart stood out prominently, but I also saw Belk and Old Navy stores. Ross and Pier One were there too. J.C. Penney and Target will open next year. This was of interest to me because people's homes once stood where those stores now stand. Most of the homeowners had no choice but to leave because the Alabaster city council used its power of eminent domain to seize thei
  • Aug 3, 2006

    JLS 20.2: What Lies Within?

    by Liberty and Power

    [cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]

    The latest issue (20.2) of the Journal of Libertarian Studies is out. Catch the action:

    Valentin Petkantchin argues that Adam Smith’s “third duty of the sovereign” is less interventionist than traditionally thought; B. K. Marcus defends the privatisation of the airwaves; Bob Murphy and Gene Callahan challenge
  • Aug 3, 2006

    Where Are The Young Libertarian Historians?

    by Liberty and Power

    Put another way, how many libertarians under age thirty-five are professionally trained as historians? My reasonably educated guess is that the number is not only miniscule but dwindling with each passing year.

    It was not always so. Around 1989, I attended a conference organized by Leonard Liggio of the Institute for Humane Studies that brought together a group of promising young libertarian historians including Hans Eichholz, Lenore Thomas Ealy, Brad Birzer, Peter Mentzel, Steve Da

  • Aug 2, 2006

    "Sorry" Doesn't Cut It

    by Liberty and Power

    From Adam Shatz in yesterday's LA Times:
    Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that Israel did, in fact, make the same mistake twice in Qana — or, to take another recent example, in Gaza, where a family of eight spending an afternoon on the beach was killed by an errant Israeli shell
  • Aug 2, 2006

    Speaking Truth to Power

    by Liberty and Power

    Israel has failed to understand that it cannot expel a people and call itself the victim; that it cannot conquer its neighbours and treat any and all resistance to that conquest as terrorism; that it cannot arm itself as a regional superpower and annihilate the institutional fabric of two peoples without incurring the fury of their children in the years that follow.
  • Aug 2, 2006

    Is Bush Blair's Poodle?

    by Liberty and Power

    Brendan O’Neill asserts that the Bush administration is heir to the 'humanitarian warfare' masterminded by arch-interventionist Tony Blair. Well worth reading.

    O’Neill concludes thus:"What the liberal commentators berating Blair for being Bush's poodle really seem to dislike about Bush's military interventionism is that it appears brash, uncouth, clumsy. Blair, you see, did it with more panache, making sure t
  • Aug 2, 2006

    A Leftist Looks at the American Left

    by Liberty and Power

    Leftist philosopher Michael Neumann has written a perceptive essay about the American left and its failures in recent years.

    "The short of it is that you cannot build an effective movement on altruism, which means that, for many of the causes that most concern us, you cannot build an effective movement at all. There is an alternative, unromantic and unsatisfying, but much more promising, and therefore morally

  • Jul 31, 2006

    Well Worth Reading

    by Liberty and Power

    Go here for Professor Juan Cole's informed account of Hizbullah that distinguishes it from al-Qaeda.

    And go here for his thoughtful and disturbing analysis of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani's response to Israel's war on Lebanon. Other commentators have written something similar but Cole has penned some especially
  • Jul 31, 2006

    This is a Dangerous Website

    by Liberty and Power

    Cross Posted on The Trebach Report

    The Washington Times ran a two thirds page advertisement, in their July 24th issue that contained, written in very small letters, on the bottom right the words “Office of National Drug Policy” because tax money paid for at least part of it. The ad gives out the website www.TheAntiDrug.com and its large type headline set off in a black box reads DRUGS, DEALERS, DANGER … JUST A CLICK AWAY. The next li

  • Jul 31, 2006

    Where Is the Constitution?

    by Liberty and Power

    The question in the title is not like"Who's buried in Grant's tomb?" The answer isn't the National Archives. I mean the real constitution -- the set of attitudes that reflect what Americans will accept as legitimate actions by the people in government. Those tacit"rules" are the real constitution, not a piece of parchment behind glass somewhere or a booklet in someone's pocket. This real constitution more or less makes the written Constitution what it is at any given time. W
  • Jul 31, 2006

    The Antiwar Hayekians Proven Right Again

    by Liberty and Power

    Taking their cues from the insights of F.A. Hayek, antiwar libertarians warned in 2003 that the Iraq war would produce unintended consequences for those who supported it. One of the chief hopes of pro-war conservatives and libertarians at the time was the prospect of new allies for the U.S. in the Middle East.

  • Jul 30, 2006

    Not World War III

    by Liberty and Power

    When a war breaks out somewhere, two sound principles for civilized people are: (1) demand an immediate ceasefire and, failing that, (2) keep the war contained--do not broaden it, do not join in.

    We can gauge the civility of the Bush administration's neoconservative boosters by the fact that they reject both principles.
    My op-ed"Not World War III" appears today in the
  • Jul 30, 2006

    Another Anti-Semite Is Born

    by Liberty and Power

    The other day on CNN I saw a woman in Tyre, Lebanon, whose apartment had fallen in on her thanks to Israeli bombers, shout,"Death to Israel. God punish Israel."

    No doubt an anti-Semite, like the young men chanting the same thing as they stood amid the rubble that was once their town.

    I am reminded of Karl Kraus's aphorism:"The psychiatrist unfailingly recognizes the madman by his excited behavior on being incarcerated."

    Likewise, the Israel supporter unfail
  • Jul 29, 2006

    Smugglers All

    by Liberty and Power

    Americans should take pride that John Hancock, a signer of the Declaration and Independence and financier of the revolution, was a smuggler par excellence but now it appears that his British counterparts were playing both sides of the street.

    In an arti

  • Jul 28, 2006

    The Man Who Would Be King

    by Liberty and Power

    In 1931 Anthony Hall, a former Shropshire police inspector, created consternation at Buckingham Palace when he spoke to large audiences across the West Midlands making his claim to the British throne. On one occasion he announced that, "The King is a German, a pure bred German ... I want to become the first policeman to cut off the King's head."

    The story unfolds in correspondence to the Home Office and the Palace released today at the National Archives. Hall traced his a
  • Jul 26, 2006

    Jonathan Cook: Five Myths That Sanction Israel's War Crimes

    by Liberty and Power

    Readers who chide Israeli attacks on Lebanon as"disproportionate" or worse yet support Israel's victory in the current conflict, would do well to read British journalist Jonathan Cook's informed demolition of Five Myths That Sanction Israel's War Crimes. Since the current conflict began, I've been suspicious of the demonization of Hezbollah by governments and commentators around the world, and not least by those writers who identify a
  • Jul 25, 2006

    Reply to Somin on Libertarians and the Iraq War

    by Liberty and Power

    Here is my take on Ilya Somin’s thoughtful discussion over at Volokh about possible reasons for the split between pro and antiwar libertarians. Somin's comments are highlighted.

    One possibly theory is that this disagreement tracks the longstanding division between those who endorse an absolutist interpretation of libertarian principle versus those who take a maximizing approach. Wars clea
  • Jul 24, 2006

    The Humanitarian Urge is Morphing into Thirst for War

    by Liberty and Power

    Simon Jenkins says that calls to send troops back into Lebanon beggar belief."We should dispatch the Red Cross, not the aircraft carriers."

    He concludes:"Of course something must be done about the agonies suffered by the people of the Middle East. Humanity demands it. I would sail the first Red Cross ship into Beirut harbour. But I would sink the first aircraft carrier."

    Go here to read his