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Liberty and Power

  • Feb 14, 2004

    Not Every Campus Loves Its Libertarians

    by Liberty and Power

    I'm quite glad that Steven Horwitz has had no problems as a libertarian at his campus. Wish I could say the same. Here's a quote by someone upset with a post on our campus discuss list that I had entered, citing an article from Reason:
    The right-wing"Reason" magazine is hardly a pillar of intellectual inquiry, rather a right-wing propag
  • Feb 14, 2004

    To Be or Not To Be Imminent

    by Liberty and Power

    Some might dismiss this source as"biased" against the Bush administration, but the quotes are authentic. Take a look at this nice compendium of quotes on the WMD threat from Iraq. Very entertaining stuff for your Valentine's Day.
  • Feb 14, 2004

    Friday the 13th

    by Liberty and Power

    I've already written about Communist parasites, in an effort to draw attention to the mass internal chaos that was the Soviet Union. There is probably no greater misnomer than the word"totalitarianism," because no matter how much a coercive statist apparatus tries to control the totality of a society, such control will elude its grasp. That's because planners of all kinds—whether they be Soviet commissars or Wilsonian nation-builder

  • Feb 13, 2004

    More on Campus Intellectual Diversity

    by Liberty and Power

    I also wanted to add a few comments about the KC Johnson post that Dave noted earlier.

    I was at this year's AAC&U meetings and saw Stanley Fish's talk. It was about as entertaining a piece of rhetoric as I've ever heard at a professional conference. I was there with a group of 5 other St. Lawrence folks, including my dean and president, and all agreed that it was a brilliant t

  • Feb 13, 2004

    High Sierra

    by Liberty and Power

    [cross-posted at Praxeology.net

    As a longtime believer in greater cooperation between libertarians and the Left, I was pleased to hear that the Libertarian Party has invited Carl Pope, the executive director of the Sierra Club, to speak at the LP's upcoming national convention. (See the story here.)

    I've long been puzzled by the hostility betwee
  • Feb 12, 2004

    Some Support

    by Liberty and Power

    President Bush's chief economist, Gregory Mankiw, got a lesson in Washington culture the other day. Testifying in Congress he said, as any good free trader would, that the outsourcing of labor by U.S. firms in order to take advantage of economies will bring benefits to the American people. The Democrats blasted him, of course, and the administration came to his defense—well, sort of. A White House spokesman s
  • Feb 11, 2004

    The Dead and the Damned

    by Liberty and Power

    Jonah Goldberg repeats an old refrain -- that for all the wrongful death row convictions of the last several years, wrongful execution is still a poor argument against capital punishment because America has never executed an innocent person.

    That's not entirely correct. A more accurate phrasing would be"we don't know if we've ever executed an innocent person."

    That's because once s

  • Feb 11, 2004

    The End of Dual Citizenship?

    by Liberty and Power

    I received this email on my Historians Against the War email list. Does anyone know about this?

    "A woman who holds dual citizenship in Ireland and the United States says the Department of Homeland Security sent her a letter asking her to renounce her Irish citizenship. She says she has spoken with other people with dual citizenship who also received letters asking them to give up their citizenship of any country other than the United States

    I'm a newspaper reporter for The Atlant

  • Feb 10, 2004

    Questions for Kerry, Neo-Con Identity Problems, etc.

    by Liberty and Power

    Much belated thanks for those of you suggested questions for me to ask John Kerry when, and if, I have dinner with him. Among them were pointed probes about Kosovo, his vote approving the Iraq war, and Vietnam atrocities. Others were more philosophical. Pat Lynch suggested that I query about why so few American politicians talk about liberty. In some ways, Jonathan Dresner's question was the stumper of the bunch. Can Kerry name examples of any good aspects of Bush's administration? That wou
  • Feb 10, 2004

    Which Is It?

    by Liberty and Power

    President Bush continues to maintain that the choice to avoid war belonged to Saddam Hussein alone. All he had to do was abide by the UN resolutions regarding weapons of mass destruction and other things. But surely Bush is not being honest here. He now defends the war on the grounds that not only did Saddam have the capability to build weapons, but that he was a brutal dictator, a financier of Palestinian terrorism, and the obstacle to democracy in the Middle East. Had Saddam fulfilled the UN r