Liberty and Power

• Feb 10, 2004
  

  Poor Martha, and the Rest of Us as Well

  by Liberty and Power

  No matter what your opinion of Martha Stewart the dresser, homemaker and cook, any defender of liberty will be disappointed to see politically motivated prosecutors trying to get her thrown in jail this week on charges of lying to federal prosecutors. It seems that everywhere the government is finding it"necessary" to essentially subvert markets that work just fine thank you.

  For a nice review of how markets, not government, can handle cheaters quite efficiently you should read Fred McChe

  

• Feb 10, 2004
  

  Sure You Wanna' Pick This Fight?

  by Liberty and Power

  So conservatives from Limbaugh to Lowry to Hannity to Goldberg are hitting back at questions about President Bush's Vietnam National Guard service by questioning John Kerry's patriotism, apparently because Kerry protested the war after he came home from serving. They're rolling old tape of Kerry testifying before Congress, telling horrible tales of wartime terror and abuses by U.S. soldiers which, NR's Lowry said last night on F
  

• Feb 10, 2004
  

  Not a Bush-Bashing Post

  by Liberty and Power

  President Bush's new budget slates 65 federal programs for termination!

  I might mention that the grand total of all of these cuts is a paltry $4.9 billion -- spittin' in the ocean, really -- and that most of them were proposed in Bush's previous budget, then added back in by Congress, which means that's the likely outcome this time around, too. But adding those caveats would be inconsistent with the headline for this post. So I won'

  

• Feb 9, 2004
  

  FMA Follow-up

  by Liberty and Power

  Well, the hardest-working law prof in the blogosphere, Eugene Volokh, has an interpretation of the Federal Marriage Amendment that is closer to Andrew Sullivan's than my own. I generally respect Eugene's take on these things, even when I don't agree with him. I'm thrilled to have yet one more reason to oppose the FMA.
  

• Feb 9, 2004
  

  What Makes Them Leave

  by Liberty and Power

  I have a column on Tech Central Station today that for the most part states the obvious (though you'd never know it from media reports): The states that are most losing manufacturing and tech jobs are also -- and not by coincidence -- the states that have the least business-friendly tax and regulatory policies.
  

• Feb 9, 2004
  

  just a thought

  by Liberty and Power

  As I was watching President Bush discuss his rational for going to war with Iraq I was struck by the utter lack of logic in his reasoning. Saddam was an evil guy and he had the means to get WMD. OK, perhaps this makes sense. Perhaps in some future world Saddam may have gotten WMD and then used them. But if we use the logic that Bush used, means and motivation, what does that say about the U.S.

  Not that we need to be reminded, but the U.S. has thousands of tons of chemical weapons. Now

  

• Feb 9, 2004
  

  How Broadly Can We Generalize about Academic Institutions?

  by Liberty and Power

  On February 4, Steven Horwitz made an interesting claim about which kinds of universities are most likely to suffer from unaccountable administration. Referring to the Deming case, in which a dean at the University of Oklahoma has stripped a senior faculty member of tenure, allegedly for openly criticizing the dean’s political agenda, Steve said:

  My own guess is that, like the problem of political

  

• Feb 9, 2004
  

  Armey of Darkness

  by Liberty and Power

  [cross-posted on Praxeology.net]
  
  I just finished watching, on C-Span, an extremely frustrating Cato Institute panel on Hayek. The panelists were Hayek biographers Bruce Caldwell and Alan Ebenstein -- and, for no reason I could discern, Senator Dick Armey. Caldwell and Ebenstein could barely get a word in edgewise, as Armey monopolised the event, rambling on about faith and humility, and generally making liberty sound about as mu
  

• Feb 9, 2004
  

  The Sounds of Silence -- and the Meaning of Nothing

  by Liberty and Power

  Well, it's official now. We're truly crazy:

  Yesterday we mentioned in passing that faithful viewer djsteve had purchased a track that cost him the"best 99 cents [he'd] ever spent." The joke, of course, was that it was the second track from The Whitey Album by Ciccone Youth, which consists of a minute and three seconds' worth of silence. To tell you the truth, while we're amused by the fact that Apple is charging 99 ce

  

• Feb 8, 2004
  

  Administrators, Academic and Otherwise

  by Liberty and Power

  Well, Robert has raised a number of good questions in the post below about academia. I want to focus on his ending questions:

  Perhaps a Tier II liberal arts college is less likely to hire (or retain) deans with monstrous egos than a middle-level state university with top 20 ambitions. Perhaps, too, such a college is more likely to involve faculty in evaluating deans, and less likely to deep-six faculty complaints about their performance. But have the lib

  

• Feb 8, 2004
  

  Oh, It's A "Liturgical Celebration"

  by Liberty and Power

  I said I was done with Boobgate. Well, I lied. Not lied exactly -- I hadn't yet seen this wonderfully entertaining column from Michael Novak (which I discovered via Greg Beato's intentionally entertaining roundup of conservatives losing their bearings).

  I must fi

  

• Feb 8, 2004
  

  Who Says Being a Hawk Means Never Having to Say You're Sorry?

  by Liberty and Power

  In his latest, Victor Davis Hanson sets the bar for apology rather high:

  If the United States went to war with Iraq only because of the threat of WMDs; if the mass murdering of Saddam Hussein was found on examination to be highly exaggerated; if we had some secret plan for stealing the oil of Iraq, if Saddam Hussein posed no future threat to the United States or its allies; if the w