[The Harm in Hate Speech by Jeremy Waldron (Harvard University Press, 2012)]
In many countries, though not in most parts of the United States, laws prohibit “hate speech.” Those who, in Jeremy Waldron’s opinion, uncritically elevate the benefits of free speech over competing values oppose hate-speech laws; but Waldron thinks that a strong case can be made in their favor.
The dreaded question that every self-identified libertarian has to face is the infamous, “Without the government, who would build the roads?” I have dealt with the roads objection at further length in a past paper (as have many others).
With President Trump’s deployment of US troops to Los Angeles, this is a good time to review the deep antipathy that America’s Founding Fathers and our American ancestors had toward “standing armies,” which was the term they used for the national-security state form of governmental structure under which we have all been born and raised.
There are many reasons for disliking the Federal Reserve, and readers often encounter a wide variety of these reasons in articles and commentary by financial writers and economists. It is often the case, however, that many critics of the Fed attack the Fed for the wrong reasons.
For example, one will often see Fed critics attacking the Fed for not lowering interest rates enough or soon enough. This is just one variation of the idea that the Fed is not doing things “correctly.”
Israel’s military operations against the Iranian regime has brought to the forefront deep simmering tensions within the modern American right on the question of foreign policy. At the forefront of this dynamic is President Trump himself, who escalated tensions with Iran his first term by ending the Obama’s administration nuclear deal and authorized military strikes against Qasem Soleimani before prioritizing a new diplomatic arrangement with Tehran during the first six months of his term.
In the serenity that privacy affords, we choose the facets of our lives that we wish to leave untouched by the world. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, in his Olmstead v. United States dissenting opinion, famously described privacy as “the right to be let alone.” But at a deeper level, privacy is a safeguard for liberty. It’s a pillar of decentralized institutions and a foundation of free societies.
