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Liberty and Power

  • May 12, 2004

    Iran: The Anti-Beard Revolution

    by Liberty and Power

    As a follow-up to my posts here and here, take a look at the continuing Nicholas Kristoff series on Iran. His newest article,"Overdosing on Islam" is a worthwhile read. Kristoff tells us how the younger generation is disgusted with the reign of mullahs. As one young
  • May 12, 2004

    Iraq: Surpassing the Costs of World War I

    by Liberty and Power

    I've made countless references to World War I and Wilsonianism in my blogging at L&P. Today's parallel comes via the Mises Economics Blog (thanks Jeff Tucker) and FEE. Check out a fine article on the"War Boom," which appeared in Monday's Washington Post. Of particular interest is this reality:

    In
  • May 11, 2004

    Longing for the Good Old Days

    by Liberty and Power

    During L'affaire Lewinsky, conservatives said that it took Bill Clinton to make sex a staple of the nightly news. At least that was consensual sex.
  • May 11, 2004

    Nation-Building and Psychiatry

    by Liberty and Power

    Inspired by a recent thread on SOLO HQ, which included a tangential discussion on the purpose of criminal justice, I recalled some of Ayn Rand's comments on the subject and I'm now wondering aloud how these comments might apply to the illusory neoconservative goal of"nation-building."

    In a letter to philosopher John Hospers, dated 29 April 1961, Ayn Rand wrote the following:

    But you ask me what is the pu
  • May 11, 2004

    Are We All Consequentialists Now?

    by Liberty and Power

    [cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]

    The current (June 2004) issue of Reason magazine carries the following letter to the editor. (I've restored my original formatting, plus a section -- marked in brackets -- that Reason deleted for space.)

    To the Editor:

    In"Coercion vs. Consent" (March), Randy Barnett writes that"there are very few libertaria
  • May 10, 2004

    Why Should We Care?

    by Liberty and Power

    My last post on L&P raises one significant question: Why should we care? Why should any of us care whether our libertarian or classical liberal heroes are used to justify the folly that is Iraq?

    It all comes down to preserving a legacy, more specifically a radical legacy: a legacy that questions fundamentals and that attempts to go to the roots of social problems. The great liberal and libertarian thinkers have l

  • May 10, 2004

    Debating Foreign Policy with "Objectivists"

    by Liberty and Power

    As readers of L&P know, I acknowledge a great intellectual debt to thinkers such as Ayn Rand, F. A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, and others. For the longest time, I identified on a personal level with Rand's"Objectivism," with its celebration of reason, purpose, and self-esteem, and of the heroic human potential, and with its emphasis on the integration of mind and body, reason and emotion, morality and prudence, theory and practice. Those ideas still inform my personal

  • May 9, 2004

    Heaven

    by Liberty and Power

    In his new book Freedom Just Around the Corner: A New American History 1585-1828, Walter McDougall describes Washington D.C. 200 years ago:

    It is hard to imagine today, but in 1802 the entire federal headquarters numbered 291 people, of whom 138 comprised Congress itself. The executive branch totaled 132. The State Department had ten employees, the war and navy departments thirty, and the

  • May 9, 2004

    No Friends of Bill W.

    by Liberty and Power

    Last weekend, the Washington Post ran a profile of Susan Cheever, author of a new biography on Acoholics Anonymous founder Bill Wilson. Read the following passage from the piece, and take note of your own reaction upon reading it:
    Cheever came to the pages covering Christmas 1970. On the eve of the holiday, Bill Wilson passed a fitful night. A lifelong smoker, he had been fighting emphysema for ye
  • May 9, 2004

    Pressure Continues to Build at USM

    by Liberty and Power

    Previously during the crisis at the University of Southern Mississippi, President Shelby Thames and his personal spokesflack Lisa Mader have been extremely voluble. Again and again they have made statements to the press that have come back to bite them.

    Suddenly a pall of silence has descended over the Dome (as the central administration building at USM is called). With the help of his remaining backers on the state College Board, Thames has staved off being fired until at least

  • May 8, 2004

    Iran Update

    by Liberty and Power

    As a follow-up to my post, Laissez Faire in Iran, take a look at Nicholas Kristoff's own follow-up article,"Those Sexy Iranians." Kristoff tells us more about a younger generation of Iranian baby boomers (60 percent of the country's population was born after the revolution) who declare:"We want fun ... There's no jo

  • May 8, 2004

    Foreign Policy Debates

    by Liberty and Power

    I've been busy engaging in a number of foreign policy debates on several lists, making many of the same points that I've made here at L&P. You might want to check out some of the more inflammatory aspects of that debate on a recent thread at SOLO HQ (see my posts, starting here and extending through here, thus far).

    I should also no

  • May 8, 2004

    The Dominant Paradigm

    by Liberty and Power

    David Brooks in today’s New York Times epitomizes what’s wrong with the dominant thinking about the fix we are in with respect to Afghanistan, Iraq, and the rest of the Middle East:

    It was U.S. inaction against Al Qaeda that got us into this mess in the first place. It was our tolerance of Arab autocracies that contributed to the madness in the Middle East.

    Inaction? It takes an ama

  • May 8, 2004

    More Moore

    by Liberty and Power

    Let me be precise: my point about Moore was not specific to this particular incident. From my reading of this one, Miramax agreed to funding but made no promise of distribution, and Moore knew that. I'm not claiming that he did this all intentionally as a publicity stunt, although that wouldn't be out of character for him. My point was more general: given the man's past patterns of being very loose with the truth, there's no reason to accept anything he says at face value. Ever

  • May 8, 2004

    Michael Moore and Disney III

    by Liberty and Power

    Before anyone condemns Michael Moore as a charlatan read the second comment on David Beito’s post directly below.