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Liberty and Power

  • Apr 26, 2004

    THE DEBATE ABOUT SOCIAL SECURITY

    by Liberty and Power

    Thank you, David, for your kind invitation to return to Liberty & Power for another week of blogging.

    As readers are aware, there's much discussion and no little concern about the prospective bankruptcy of Social Security in the U.S. and comparable unfunded state pension schemes in other countries. Self-proclaimed advocates of the free market have often invoked such fears to argue for some measure of privatization, usually a mandatory requirement that people invest some stipulated percent

  • Apr 25, 2004

    #$&!!!%$*&#!!

    by Liberty and Power

    No comment:

    WASHINGTON, April 25 — A vast multitude of protesters marched here today in support of abortion rights and to highlight what organizers contend is the Bush administration's erosion of reproductive liberties. ...

    Karen Hughes, an adviser to President Bush, appeared on CNN today to provide a counterpoint to the anti-Bush sentiment o

  • Apr 25, 2004

    Ah, Me. What Can You Say?

    by Liberty and Power

    About this:

    A new poll shows that 57 percent of Americans continue to believe that Saddam Hussein gave"substantial support" to al-Qaida terrorists before the war with Iraq, despite a lack of evidence of that relationship.

    In addition, 45 percent of Americans have the impression that" clear evidence" was found that Iraq worked closely with Osama bin Laden's network, and a majority believe that before the

  • Apr 25, 2004

    Chickenhawks of the Past, and Present

    by Liberty and Power

    The editors of the New Republic took a position similar to [John] Dewey's, except that they arrived at it even earlier. In his editorial in the magazine's first issue in November, 1914, Herbert Croly cheerily prophesied that the war would stimulate America's spirit of nationalism and therefore bring it closer to democracy. At first hesitant about the collectivist war economies in Europe, the New Republic soon began to cheer and urged the United States to follow the le
  • Apr 24, 2004

    Say It Ain't So!

    by Liberty and Power

    Stop the presses! Bureaucrats at the UN are suspected of corruption in their running of the “Oil for Food ” program while economic sanctions were being imposed on the Iraqi people. Who’d have thought that was possible?
  • Apr 24, 2004

    Less than Meets the Eye

    by Liberty and Power

    As a follow-up to this, I note that the American administrators of Iraq have also said that “limited sovereignty” does not include the authority to make laws. As far as I can tell, limited sovereignty encompasses only the power to wash the windows in Paul Bremer’s office.

    Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman said, “The structure of the government…should not

  • Apr 23, 2004

    Buying Books Online

    by Liberty and Power

    Apropos of Pat Lynch's comment about not automatically going to amazon.com, to purchase a book, probably the best place to buy both new and used books on the Internet is at fetchbook.info/. It offers comparative prices on both new and used books, from over 40,000 book dealers, and it is obvious that Amazon is not always the best buy, even on new ones.

    To go to fetchbook.info/, click here.

  • Apr 23, 2004

    Federalism, the EU, and Liberty

    by Liberty and Power

    Am currently working on a paper that discusses Jim Buchanan's view of federalism for a conference, and it got me thinking a lot about the EU. In principle a federal system should increase political and economic liberty. Political liberty grows when several governments have to share power; economic liberty grows because leviathan does not have monopoly taxing power. This is the case that
  • Apr 22, 2004

    Duh!

    by Liberty and Power

    The other day I noted that neuroscientists are studying blood flows in the brain in a futile effort to learn what’s “really going on” inside voters’ heads when they see political commercials. On Thursday Fox News did a straight report on this non-story. The dumbest part was the reaction by Susan Estrich, the leftish law professor and Democratic operative: “What's the line betwee
  • Apr 22, 2004

    Right Out of Orwell

    by Liberty and Power

    From the Washington Post:

    The new Iraqi interim government scheduled to take control on July 1 will have only"limited sovereignty" over the country and no authority over U.S. and coalition military forces already there, senior State and Defense officials told Congress this week.

    And Iraqi women will experience only limited pregnancy.

  • Apr 22, 2004

    Richard Perle's Contradiction, and Dishonesty

    by Liberty and Power

    Juan Cole testified on an expert panel before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on Tuesday -- and who do you think was added as an"expert" at the last minute? Richard Perle, that's who. Cole has a fascinating report about the proceedings, including this:

    Perle's entire testimony was a camouflaged piece of flakking for Ahmad Chalabi. ...

    In fact, Perle kept talking about"the

  • Apr 22, 2004

    Nooners Goes Bonkers

    by Liberty and Power

    I find it truly incredible that a newspaper that wants to be taken seriously can publish drivel like this on a regular basis. I hereby dub Ms. Noonan"Nooners," since she sounds like an adolescent girl who just learned some"grown-up" words and now uses them to justify her latest crush."Nooners" has a nice sort of round-the-bend quality to it, like Nooners herself at this point, and for quite a long time now actually. Oh, by the way, I dissected Nooners' hagiographic treatment of Bush at some

  • Apr 22, 2004

    War for Innovation?

    by Liberty and Power

    Thomas Friedman of the New York Times is apparently unfamiliar with the voluminous economic literature on the benefits of market-based social cooperation, especially the division of labor and the law of association. Why else would he refer to a"war" for innovation, as he does in this horrendous column:

    The bottom line: we are actually in the middle of two struggles right now. One is against the Islamist te
  • Apr 22, 2004

    Bush in a Nutshell

    by Liberty and Power

    I know this has been commented on before, but I cannot resist. Here's the American people's and the world's problem in a nutshell. At his recent press conference President Bush said,"[M]y job as the President is to lead this nation into making the world a better place."

    Perhaps there is nothing more dangerous for a president to think.

  • Apr 22, 2004

    David Beito on Bruce Bartlett

    by Liberty and Power

    David's link to Bruce Bartlett's column below reminds me a previous"issues" regarding this war that now seem trivial in the face of daily mayhem and death in Iraq, but I think are worth remembering.

    1) Why did we fight this war? Was it oil? WMD? Liberation? Saddam? Links to terrorist? 9/11? The administration has never previously, nor effectively now, tells us why. It's almost like some really bad relationship you're in. You don't remember why you got there, and instead just keep