Archive for January, 2010
By David J. Theroux | Friday January 29, 2010 at 11:58 AM PDT | 9 Comments
The remarkable and haunting, independent, 2009, science fiction short film, 2081: Everyone Will Finally Be Equal, is based on the Kurt Vonnegut short story, “Harrison Bergeron,” from his book, Welcome to the Monkey House, and is now available on DVD. Vonnegut’s powerful and incisive story critiques egalitarian statism in which “equality” is the only...
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Tags: Civil Liberties, Civil Society, Constitution, Corruption, Entertainment, Fascism, Law, Liberty, Morality, Personal Liberty, Propaganda, Religion, Socialism, Surveillance, Technology, The State, Video
By Randall Holcombe | Thursday January 28, 2010 at 3:14 PM PDT | 5 Comments
I’ve commented before on the explicitly liberal (in the contemporary sense of the word) turn that Newsweek magazine has recently taken. While I’ve always viewed the magazine as having a liberal bias, until recently it came across as liberal reporters attempting to present the facts. Now they’ve quit reporting the news (because it’s so...
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Tags: Civil Liberties, Elections, Integrity, Law, Media, Politics, Regulation
By Anthony Gregory | at 8:44 AM PDT | 12 Comments
Last night, I suffered through Obama’s speech. I noticed the overarching theme was: in 2010, the administration will finally getting around to all it promised for 2009, as well as a whole other year worth of miracles. He begins by taking credit for saving the economy from a second Great Depression. “[W]e acted, immediately...
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Tags: Afghanistan, Bailouts, Budget and Tax Policy, Business, Civil Liberties, Constitution, Corporatism, Global Warming, Government subsidies, Iran, Iraq, Law, Liberty, Middle East, Military, Nationalization, Personal Liberty, Presidential Power, Torture, War, Welfare
By David J. Theroux | Wednesday January 27, 2010 at 12:09 PM PDT | 3 Comments
In the fallout from Climategate, the Times of London reports that Great Britain’s chief scientific adviser John Beddington has now become highly critical of the dismissive and disreputable tactics and exaggerated claims of climate alarmists within the scientific community. Professor Beddington said that climate scientists should be less hostile to sceptics who questioned man-made...
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Tags: Corruption, Environment, Global Warming, Integrity, Politics, Propaganda, Science, Technology, Transparency
By David J. Theroux | at 9:44 AM PDT | 1 Comment
Charles Krauthammer reveals on the “O’Reilly Factor” on Fox News that President Barack Obama’s “spending freeze” is a complete fraud, in which Obama is not just excluding all major areas of federal government spending (i.e., discretionary, Social Security, military, stimulus, etc.), but is locking in the already gigantic increases in federal department spending levels...
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Tags: Bailouts, Budget and Tax Policy, Corruption, Economics, Elections, Government subsidies, Media, Politics, Presidential Power, Propaganda, Socialism, The State, Transparency, Video
By David J. Theroux | Tuesday January 26, 2010 at 1:21 PM PDT | 5 Comments
Here is a splendid and insightful, new rap video pitting the ideas of Nobel Laureate, Austrian School economist Friedrich A. Hayek against those of Lord John Maynard Keynes. As Hayek has shown, economic crises of boom and bust are created by governments that expand credit through central banks, creating unsustainable bubbles that ultimately crash....
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Tags: American History, Bailouts, Books, Budget and Tax Policy, Business, Corporatism, Economics, Federal Reserve, Free Market, Government subsidies, Great Depression, Inflation, Labor, Money and Banking, Taxation, The State, Unemployment, Video, War
By Robert Higgs | Sunday January 24, 2010 at 10:43 AM PDT | 18 Comments
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, we are witnessing an outpouring of wailing and gnashing of teeth. Progressives emphatically deny that a corporation consists of nothing more than a voluntary aggregation of natural persons and that therefore it has all the rights of speech that...
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Tags: Civil Liberties, Constitution, Elections, Law, Liberty, Politics, The State
By Robert Higgs | Saturday January 23, 2010 at 8:52 PM PDT | 11 Comments
Although I am reputed to be a cynic, a pessimist, and a bah-humbugger, I am not given to doomsaying in the same way that a growing number of others are. Although I tend to expect, as Thomas Jefferson did, that the natural progress of things will be for liberty to yield and government to...
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Tags: Disaster Management, Economics, Europe
By Jonathan Bean | at 7:38 PM PDT | 3 Comments
From the Wall Street Journal: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704509704575018990188917592.html In my Race and Liberty in America: The Essential Reader, there are many entries on immigration that make clear that this nation, particularly business, has benefitted from the low-to-high skilled labor of immigrants. Business knows this essential fact and supported open immigration policies since this nation began industrializing....
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Tags: American History, Environment, Immigration
By Randall Holcombe | Wednesday January 20, 2010 at 11:20 AM PDT | 1 Comment
In a post a few months ago I lamented that state government officials, who have much to lose in the proposed federal healthcare reforms, have not spoken out much in opposition to the costs the reforms would foist on them. There have been a few cases, and here is another. Florida Attorney General Bill...
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Tags: Healthcare, Politics