Americans are in the midst of heated presidential nomination battles, with leading candidates competing to buy the most votes with ever-more promises to abuse liberty for one or another special interest group. Except for occasional boilerplate obeisance to freedom, none of them are proposing anything like it. It makes one wish to hear what kind of addresses a presidential candidate who was a true lover of liberty might give.

One of the few memorable quotes from last nights GOP debate came from Mike Huckabee. In describing the “earthly benefits” devolped by NASA:

The Thinking about Thinking blog has thoughts.

Robert Taft, champion of a non-interventionist foreign policy and leader of the Republican resistance to post-FDR foreign policy, gave a stirring speech against conscription in 1946. There is one step now proposed, supported by government propaganda, which seems to me to strike at the very basis of freedom. It is the proposal that we establish compulsory military training in time of peace. The power to take a boy from his home and subject him to complete government discipline is the most serious limitation on freedom that can be imagined. Many who have accepted the idea favor a similar government-controlled training for all girls....Military conscription is essentially totalitarian.

If you remember, the two previous entries were about the problem of economic organization under capitalism and why this system of economic organization makes an integrated and comprehensive theoretical understanding of which a particularly distinctive task. A capitalist, division-of-labor, economic system is not at all like a Robinson Crusoe economy. It even cannot be conceived as a mere summation of individual Robinsons.

A most pathetic comment from Warren Buffett, who is horrifying when it comes to assesing politics and freedom. Family heirs, he says, have already won an “ovarian lottery,” and thus should not be “rewarded” by the tax system. Mr. Buffett, however, doesn’t explain why the lack of theft is considered to be a “reward.”

Known typically for their chocolate and beer it seems that the soft-spoken Belgians are in the middle of a political crisis: the secession of Flanders (cue quote from Homer). If you thought 149 days without an acting government was hard to imagine in these times of statolatry, what about 171 and counting?

Hard Choices, from Corporate Counsel, Dec. 2007 (alternate link). Discusses the persecution of Chiquita by the feds and the US legal system for paying off terrorists to protect their employees. The evil of the state on full display — the state doesn’t protect them, and refuses to let them protect themselves (and of course, to the lawyerly mind, both sides “have a point”. Ugh.).

It’s so funny how the “strike” — once considered the great weapon in the arsenal of the workers of the world-has been reduced to this: