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Liberty and Power

  • Feb 16, 2004

    Gay Marriage and the Rule of Law

    by Liberty and Power

    On San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom's decision to issue marriage licenses in violation of state law, the Instaman writes:
    Newsom would deny others the right to violate a law he believes in, but feels free to violate the law himself when he chooses, even though his sole claim to legitimacy as a government official comes from the law.

    It's not civil disobedience when it's done by someone who controls the machinery of gov

  • Feb 16, 2004

    Found in Translation

    by Liberty and Power

    Professor Juan Cole is soliciting help on "The Americana in Arabic Library Translation Project," so the Arab world can, among other things, read Thomas Jefferson:

    The project will begin with a selected set of passages and essays by Thomas Jefferson on constitutional and governmental issues such as freedom of religion, the separation of powers, inalienable rights, the sovereignty of the people, and so forth.

    Obligatory snarky remark:

  • Feb 16, 2004

    Classroom Bias: Real and/or Imagined

    by Liberty and Power

    This whole issue of classroom bias is one that I think about a lot. Having survived The University of Michigan as an "out" libertarian, and then doing graduate work at George Mason, I've both been the outsider and the insider politically. And now being at a small liberal arts college whose faculty is probably near the mean in terms of their "leftiness", I get to see these issues from both sides: leftist colleagues and conservative/libertarian students who comp

  • Feb 16, 2004

    Technology Administration, Too

    by Liberty and Power

    Jonathan Dresner’s comment about computer and information technology as still another growth area in university administration deserves to be foregrounded:

    Another area that has seen substantial administrative growth at institutions I'm familiar with is technology management. At one college, computer services were initially a suboffice of the library. When I was there the tail swallowed the dog, and the library became a coequal branch of Information/Technology Services,
  • Feb 16, 2004

    Administrative Growth at Academic Institutions

    by Liberty and Power

    In my post of February 8th I put forward the hypothesis that the average American university is carrying more administrators as a proportion of total employees now than it did in 1984, and that in turn it carried a higher proportion of administrators in 1984 than it had in 1964.

    Steven Horwitz’ response (also 2/8) is largely congruent with the available data about administrative expansion where I work.

    Steven mentions that over the last 15 years, at his institution, there

  • Feb 16, 2004

    Your Tax Dollars at Work Harassing Business People

    by Liberty and Power

    For those of you who have lived or do currently live in a large city you know that local governments are typically larger and therefore far more corrupt and inefficient than their counterparts in smaller communities. We often hear justifications for these large bloated bureaucracies based on economies of scale - larger communities need more rules, regulations and government.

    While most American cities have gone through a revival in the past 15 years, several large Northern rust belt citie

  • Feb 16, 2004

    Calvin Coolidge: Civil Rights Defender

    by Liberty and Power

    In honor of Black History Month, it is important to remember the forgotten legacy of the Republican Party and its contribution to African American civil rights. Most Americans today, including GOP politicians who should know better, assume that Republicans of the past"were on the wrong side of history," yet the black vote did not disappear until 1964, and only then because presidential candidate Barry Goldwater opposed the Civil Rights Act on libertarian grounds. Significantly, however, MORE Rep
  • Feb 16, 2004

    The Case Against Idiocy

    by Liberty and Power

    This graced the cover of the Washington Post's Sunday Outlook section this week. I really wish I had time to thoroughly debunk it. But to do it properly would take a week, at least. And that would be an inefficient use of my time. I've read it three times now, and there's not an ounce of reason or reality to be found anywhere in the article. Even more amazing, there are times when the author mana
  • Feb 16, 2004

    More Anarchy!

    by Liberty and Power

    For those who've been following my online debate on anarchism with Robert Bidinotto, my latest contribution is here.
  • Feb 15, 2004

    Why Classroom Bias Now?

    by Liberty and Power

    In my prior post, I promised some unoriginal theorizing about the heightened interest in the classroom bias issue. As the example I used there suggests, I think much of it is related to 9/11. What 9/11 did was to blow the lid off of the politics of many faculty, and make those politics clear to the broader public. Those of us in academia have always known what many/most faculty thought about the US and its foreign policies, but

  • Feb 15, 2004

    Out of the Mouths of Babes

    by Liberty and Power

    So my 12 year-old son and 8 year-old daughter were in the room while I was watching some political talk show and my son says "So tell me again what a libertarian is?" And I answered "someone who thinks the government should interfere in people's lives as little as possible." My daughter says "that's mean!" I replied "why is it so mean for government to bother people as little as possible?" She says "oh, as little as possible. I thought
  • Feb 15, 2004

    Thinking Like a State

    by Liberty and Power

    [cross-posted at Praxeology.net]

    Suppose you owned a mostly vacant lot that happened to contain a famous historical landmark, one that attracted visitors from all over the world. What would you do?

    Would you put a fence around the site and start charging admission?

    Or would you plunk a 300-pound concrete slab down on top of the site"to prevent it from becoming a tourist attraction"?

    Guess
  • Feb 15, 2004

    Will There Be a Reimposition of the Draft?

    by Liberty and Power

    Is there is going to be a draft? The question is in the air; Time Magazine prominently discussed the issue in its turn-of-the-year (Dec. 29 '03) issue. There is evidence that plans are being slowly and quietly laid to impose one. By now, most people have heard that the government advertised late last year for volunteers to serve as Boa
  • Feb 14, 2004

    Fair Trade Rhetoric

    by Liberty and Power

    I want to pick up on Sheldon Richman's post on Bush and free trade. Bush has most definitely flip-flopped on free trade, but his recent movements have been positive in my view. Jagdish Bhagwati's in Foreign Affairs makes a pretty good case for this.
    With President Bush strongly behind him, [U.S. Trade Representative Robert] Zoellick had cleverly ex
  • Feb 14, 2004

    Sometimes You Can't Just Listen

    by Liberty and Power

    Well King, I never said it was "always and everywhere." I've seen stuff like that here too, but it's never become institutionalized or part of the culture in ways that have been a problem for me. And yes, better listening skills ain't gonna help in that case. But it does seem like a perfect example of the sort of "argument of bad intentions" that I think can be combatted by an equally loud shout back questioning the premise. We don't always have to listen or shut up,