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Liberty and Power

  • Jan 13, 2004

    RUSH LIMBAUGH, FOOTBALL, AND JAIL TIME

    by Liberty and Power

    Two recent events have brought Rush Limbaugh into my thoughts. The first was yesterday’s NFL playoff win by the Philadelphia Eagles against the Green Bay Packers. Near the beginning of the season Limbaugh lost his job as a football commentator for ESPN because he expressed the opinion that Philadelphia quarterback Donovan McNabb received favorable treatment from the press because the media wanted a black quarterback to succeed. Many inter
  • Jan 12, 2004

    Introduction & Provocation

    by Liberty and Power

    I want to thank David Beito for inviting me to join Liberty & Power for a week. I know some of the members of the L & P roster fairly well, and others not at all. I'm dork enough that a number of my most treasured friendships began on the internet. So I hope I come out of this with more couches in other cities where I could in principle crash.

    A little about me... Until the middle of November, I worked at the Mercatus Center in the Mas

  • Jan 12, 2004

    A BUSH-GERMANY COMPARISON WORTH NOTING

    by Liberty and Power

    Your Bush-Germany, or Bush-Hitler, comparison for the week -- or more likely the year -- does not come from me. No, no: it comes courtesy of a new report on the war on terror from the Army War College, the Army's"premier academic institution." And as noted in the Washington Post story about the report:

    [Jeffrey Record's] essay, published by the Army War College's Strategic Studies Institu
  • Jan 12, 2004

    THE UNTHREATENING STORM

    by Liberty and Power

    Slate is featuring an online chat on second thoughts by liberal hawks. It features center-left pundits and analysts who backed Bush on Iraq and explores whether they're having misgivings. Participants include Jacob Weisberg, Paul Berman, Thomas Friedman, Christopher Hitchens, Fred Kaplan, George Packer, Kenneth M. Pollack, and Fareed Zakaria. So far only Weisberg and Pollack have weighed in--each with more self-examination and criti
  • Jan 12, 2004

    POSTREL ON HAYEK AND HAYEK & GAY MARRIAGE

    by Liberty and Power

    I don't know if folks saw these two pieces by Virginia Postrel on Sunday. The first is a long Boston Globe"ideas" piece on Hayek that is very well done. There's a companion piece on Hayek and gay marriage here. I post these not just because they are of possible interest but also because I'm quoted in
  • Jan 12, 2004

    TAKING ANOTHER LOOK AT POLLACK

    by Liberty and Power

    Excellent post by Arthur Silber here at L&P. I really do appreciate Kenneth M. Pollack's new discussion of the Iraq situation. It's better than what one reads from most of those on the"pro-war" side of this debate who are still trying to justify the means by the end of Hussein's reign, as if Hussein's regime was, in itself, an imminent threat to the security

  • Jan 11, 2004

    MUSICAL MADNESS

    by Liberty and Power

    Well, I had at first hoped that this entry would not have anything at all to do with politics. No such luck. Regulators appear to have entered the clinical insanity stage, seeking to control everything on earth -- including classical music.

    As someone who has passionately loved classical music (and especially opera) all my life, I was intrigued by this NYT story about a phenomenon th

  • Jan 11, 2004

    ADOBE PHOTOSHOP AND COUNTERFEITING

    by Liberty and Power

    A friend just sent me this piece on Adobe including code in Photoshop that prevents users from copying and manipulating images of many of the world's major currencies, presumably to prevent counterfeiting. There are a couple of worrisome things here, including the state apparently requesting/demanding that such code be included in private software, and Adobe agreeing and not informing cus

  • Jan 11, 2004

    KENNETH POLLACK TAKES ANOTHER LOOK

    by Liberty and Power

    As most people know, Kenneth Pollack's book The Threatening Storm was very influential in making and strengthening the case for war with Iraq. In that light, a few excerpts from Pollack's lengthy new article about the failures of our intelligence prior to the Iraq invasion are worth noting. First, this one about the area where Pollack does explicitly blame the administration for its behavior:

  • Jan 10, 2004

    YOU DON'T SAY

    by Liberty and Power

    Saddam Ouster Planned Early '01?:"The Bush Administration began making plans for an invasion of Iraq, including the use of American troops, within days of President Bush's inauguration in January of 2001 -- not eight months later after the 9/11 attacks, as has been previously reported. That's what former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill says in his first interview about his time as a White House insider. O
  • Jan 10, 2004

    THE REVOLVING DOOR -- CHAPTER 13,468,439

    by Liberty and Power

    It's always useful to have someone working for you who's well-connected:

    One of President Bush's advisers is leaving to become Ford Motor Co.'s chief lobbyist in Washington, the auto company said Friday.

    Ziad Ojakli, 36, has been working for the White House since January 2001. Most recently, he was a principal deputy for legislative affairs, serving as a liaison between Bush and the U.S. Senate. He

  • Jan 10, 2004

    LIBERTARIAN INTERVENTIONISM PART IV: SKEPTICISM ABOUT POWER

    by Liberty and Power

    [Note: this is the last in a four-part series arguing that libertarian interventionism is an oxymoron. For earlier posts, look immediately below]

    Even if one believes that it’s moral to spill American blood and (forcibly extracted) American treasure to destroy evil regimes that do not threaten us, killing many of their innocent subjects in the process, one cannot embrace war-for-liberation without abandoning the libertarian’s skepticism about power. Libertarian interventioni

  • Jan 10, 2004

    LIBERTARIAN INTERVENTIONISM PART III: THE NONAGRESSION AXIOM

    by Liberty and Power

    Attacking regimes that don’t threaten us violates the libertarian prescription against the nondefensive use of force. I don’t mean to anthropomorphize states—to suggest that in the absence of a threat, attacking Iraq violates Iraq’s “rights.” “Iraq” is not a person and has no natural rights. But launching an assault against Iraq does violate individual rights on a massive scale. War--even modern war with laser-guided bombs and airdropped care
  • Jan 10, 2004

    LIBERTARIAN INTERVENTIONISM PART II: THE LOCKEAN BARGAIN

    by Liberty and Power

    For libertarians, the first question of political philosophy is, why have a state at all? Can a coercive monopoly be justified, and if so, how? Non-anarchist libertarians usually follow Locke, Nozick, and the Declaration of Independence—answering that governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. Legitimate government, the argument goes, is a protective association founded on a social contract.

    In the American context, you can i

  • Jan 10, 2004

    LIBERTARIAN INTERVENTIONISM: WILL IT LIBERATE?

    by Liberty and Power

    Franklin Harris's recent post "Dictatress of the World" reminds me that I've been meaning to post an article I wrote a while back on the subject of libertarian interventionism. The article was for Liberty magazine which, sadly, doesn't have much of a web presence. But I'll put it up here, broken up into four medium-sized chunks. Here's the intro:

    Despite the cliché, September 11th didn’t “change everything”; it did,

  • Jan 10, 2004

    BARBARA TUCHMAN TOLD YOU SO, AND IN GREAT DETAIL

    by Liberty and Power

    And here I bet some people thought I was full of it when I posted excerpts from Barbara Tuchman's The March of Folly and her examination of the Vietnam disaster, and pointed to the similarities to the Iraq adventure in terms of the operative underlying principles. (And more Tuchman excerpts can be found here.)

    Well, Ms. Tuchman is more than

  • Jan 10, 2004

    IMAGINE IT, MR. O'NEILL

    by Liberty and Power

    In reading Drudge's latest Paul O'Neill"breaking scandal" report, I was most struck by the final line:

    "I can't imagine that I am going to be attacked for telling the truth."
    I find it hard to believe that a grown man -- and especially one who has spent as much time in politics as O'Neill has -- could actually believe this. I suspect he doesn't, in fact -- and that he only hopes he won't"be attacked for te
  • Jan 10, 2004

    WILLIAMS HAS MORE EXPLAINING TO DO

    by Liberty and Power

    I see that Keith Halderman has noted Walter Williams' correction of an error Williams made in a recent column, about the Merv Grazinski"urban legend."

    I have commented on Williams' remarks myself -- but as I go on to note, Williams made a much more serious, and much more offensive, mistake in the same earlier column. Williams relied on bogus statistics with regard