Departments

;

Liberty and Power

  • Oct 23, 2010

    Higgs Dissects the Warfare State (Liberty and Power Lecture at UA)

    by Liberty and Power

    In the picture shown above, yours truly is posing with Robert Higgs, and Alina Stefanescu Coryell (the heart and soul of the Liberty and Power Lectures) just after his talk,"Rise of the Warfare State." It was the second installment in the series at the University of Alabama.

    Despite a lack of media coverage, we attracted a lively crowd of about fifty.

  • Oct 18, 2010

    A Good Krugman Article?

    by Liberty and Power

    A two-part review by Paul Krugman and his wife, Robin Wells, ran in recent consecutive issues of the New York Review of Books. The review closes with their call for tougher sanctions against China, which Krugman has repeated elsewhere and for which he has received justifiable flak. But the review has some surprising good stuff as well, although I hate to say anything positive about Krugman these days.

    Part 1, entitled "The
  • Oct 13, 2010

    This Week in Review

    by Liberty and Power

    [cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]

    A rundown of my adventures for this past week or so:

    • On Thursday the 9th my friend Matthew Quest, history professor at Lewis University, gave a talk to Auburn’s history department on “C. L. R. James, the C. I. O., and American Civilization.” Matthew argued that although James, although technically a Marxist, was “the most libertaria
  • Oct 12, 2010

    Chile's Miracles

    by Liberty and Power

    You may have been following the Chilean miners’ rescue.

    Can you imagine any other Latin American country where this high-tech rescue could have occurred? Or, thinking back to February, can you imagine any other Latin American country that could absorb an earthquake of 8.8 magnitude as Chile did? According to Wikipedia, the death toll was 486. In contrast, the death toll in the 2010 Haitian earthquake was in the 200,000 range (admittedly, Haiti is not a Latin American country, but a
  • Oct 8, 2010

    WASPishness Ain’t What It Used to Be

    by Liberty and Power

    In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the social and political elite of the British North American colonies and, after they gained their independence, the United States of America was overwhelmingly WASPish — consisting of white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants. In the twentieth century, the composition of the elite changed enormously. This fact was brought home to me again this morning by a feature in USA Today about the current U.S. Supreme Court justices. They include six Catholics and three Je
  • Oct 8, 2010

    A Repudiation of the State's Transgression into the Realm of Personal Freedom

    by Liberty and Power

    "Two French women have taken it upon themselves to register their opposition to the niqab ban in France by covering their faces but baring their legs in miniskirts. The duo, who call themselves NiqaBitch, have posted a video where they stop traffic and turn heads and sashay in heels down the streets of Paris."

    "We were not looking to attack or degrade the image of Muslim fundamentalists – each to th
  • Oct 7, 2010

    More Spurious Claims from NPR

    by Liberty and Power

    On the October 5th episode of the Colbert Report the comedian did a story on the drug war in Mexico. The piece highlighted the fact that Mexican journalists are being intimidated by the drug cartels and featured a discussion with National Public Radio correspondent John Burnett. Judging from what Burnett had to say maybe it would be a positive development if journalists s
  • Oct 2, 2010

    1920: The Great Depression That Wasn't

    by Liberty and Power

    The Panic of 1920 started out as a contender for the greatest depression of all time, with a drop in prices and production during its first twelve months that dwarfed those of any other economic crash, and she piled on an unemployment rate that skyrocketed from invisible to 12% in a flash. Ignoring calls to do something, anything, to"help", Washington, DC simply allowed the economy to adjust wherever it chose to go. In tandem, Federal Reserve officials looked upon the rapid deflation in prices n
  • Sep 30, 2010

    Internationalizing American Insanity

    by Liberty and Power

    Warning...rant. Nothing sets me off like airport security. The slide of the United STates into the world's foremost totalitarian police state is symbolized most clearly to me by the insane 'security' being imposed upon the nation's airports. The most disturbing aspects of this police state symbol, however, are not the scanners, the armed and uniformed quasi-military, the random searches, the repeated demands for ID, the ludicrous carry-on regulations, the arrogant petty interrogators... T
  • Sep 27, 2010

    Reexamining Russian History

    by Liberty and Power

    I always find Anatol Lieven worth reading and this insightful essay is no exception.

    Lieven, a professor in the War Studies Department of King's College London and a senior fellow of the New America Foundation in Washington, DC., is author of America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism (Oxford University Press, 2004) and several other books.