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Liberty and Power

  • Apr 18, 2010

    Data Don' t Bleed

    by Liberty and Power

    I spent several hours today preparing a short article on defense spending, updating similar articles I wrote in 2004 and 2007. The subject matter required me to do a fair amount of work that most people no doubt would consider tedious – locating and cross-checking data, performing various arithmetic operations, checking my figures again and again to ensure their accuracy. I have been doing this sort of work off and on ever since my college d
  • Apr 17, 2010

    The Digital Economy Act: This Means War?

    by Liberty and Power

    "In the US, the MPAA and RIAA... just submitted comments to the American Intellectual Property Czar, Victoria Espinel, laying out their proposal for IP enforcement. They want us all to install spyware on our computers that deletes material that it identifies as infringing. They want our networks censored by national firewalls (U2's Bono also called for this in a New York Times editorial, averring that if the Chinese could control dissident information with censorware, our own governments could d
  • Apr 17, 2010

    Defense Spending Is Much Greater than You Think

    by Liberty and Power

    When President Obama presented his budget recently for fiscal year 2011, he proposed that the Pentagon’s outlays be increased by about 4.5 percent beyond its estimated outlays in fiscal 2010, to a total of almost $719 billion. Although many Americans regard this enormous sum as excessive, few appreciate that the total amount of all defense-related spending greatly exceeds the amount budgeted for the Department of Defense.

    In fiscal year 2009, which ended last September, the Pentagon
  • Apr 17, 2010

    A Few Late Words on the Coverture/Nostalgia Debate

    by Liberty and Power

    My very busy schedule at APEE prevented me from jumping in on the very interesting debate over women's liberty, coverture laws, and the more general status of human freedom over the last 150 years that was kicked off by David Boaz's column at Reason.  I can't possibly point to all of the contributions to the debate since then, but I particularly liked Will Wilkinson's contribution

  • Apr 13, 2010

    Robert Higgs’s Recent Interview by Libertad Digital

    by Liberty and Power

    I was interviewed recently by Angel Martin for Libertad Digital, an interesting Spanish website. The interview was posted today. Topics discussed include the recent financial debacle, the current recession, the government’s recent policy actions, and several related, more general subjects, such as “regime uncertainty” and U.S. foreign policy. For those w
  • Apr 12, 2010

    President Worship by Journalists in 1945 and Now

    by Liberty and Power

    I was listening earlier today to several radio news reports from sixty-five years ago on Roosevelt's death and Truman's swearing in. Libertarians and conservatives often complain about the media's failure to hold Obama to account. This is not exceptional, however. The media in World War II (with notable exceptions such as the Chicago Tribune) was even more eager to be spoonfed by the president.

    One of the news reports ironically concluded that the country was in safe hands because Harr

  • Apr 10, 2010

    WWI, Xenophobia and Suppressing Political Opposition

    by Liberty and Power

    The years surrounding America's involvement in World War I (WWI) were a watershed for how the United States treated"foreigners" within its borders during wartime. Immigrants had flooded the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. When United States declared war on Germany on April 6, 1917, almost a third of Americans were either first- or second-generation immigrants. Those born in Germany and even American-born citizens of German descent fell under suspicion of being disloyal.
  • Apr 8, 2010

    Drinking and Liberty

    by Liberty and Power

    Although the minimum drinking age is twenty-one in the U.S., it is eighteen in the UK and generally speaking its scope does not extend to private homes so adults can provide alcoholic drinks to older children. However, as you might expect, the British authorities are stepping up the war on booze. Specifically, Britain’s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs recently attacked what it called the" culture of excessive drinking" in universities and colleges. In a report by Caroline Healy, the co
  • Apr 6, 2010

    Congressman Phil Hare, Take A Bow

    by Liberty and Power

    In an exchange likely to trigger a law making it a felony to place a recording device within range of a Congressman’s mouth, a now formerly obscure politician, Illinois House member Phil Hare, was quoted – on camera – responding to a constituent’s question about the health care bill’s Constitutionality with a dismissive, “I don’t worry about the Constitution on this, to be honest”.

    The interviewer laughe
  • Apr 4, 2010

    Brownshirts, Greenshirts and Rotten Granny Smith Apples

    by Liberty and Power

    I don't need to say a lot about how our friends on the left are in a tizzy about what they see as the use of violent rhetoric by Tea Partiers and other conservatives. What does bear repeating, though, is the degree to which they are in utter denial about their own use of similar rhetoric, especially during the Bush presidency.

    But just to make the point clear, compare the following two statements:

    "You’re dead; we know where you live; we’ll get you."

    and
  • Apr 4, 2010

    McChrystal's Admission of Guilt

    by Liberty and Power

    Obama's man in Afghanistan has made an amazing admission of guilt to, dare I say, complicity in officially sanctioned murder. General Stanley McChrystal has said the following: “We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat.”

    Now, if the General would take the next logical step of calling for us to withdraw from the Afghan disaster, he might actually go down a

  • Apr 3, 2010

    Power and Fear

    by Liberty and Power

    I had missed Anthony's great post here when I wrote my piece for Lew a few days ago -- but it seems everyone is noticing that it is about power -- and fear -- their fear of losing power! Government resources will be directed at those"enemies" foreign and domestic that threaten the guys in power. What I'm discovering is the creatively designed foreign wars (my interest
  • Apr 1, 2010

    Anarchists for Big Government

    by Liberty and Power

    When I saw that an anarchist website was urging its members to " crash" the tea party movement, my first thought was that they might perform a worthy service. The anarchists would be in an excellent position, for example, to expose the statist orientation of many tea partiers on war and immigration. Unfortunately, the main complaint of the"anarchists" is that the tea partiers are too anti-government! In its call to arms