I’ve noted before, in Objectivism and Federalism and other entries linked there, “how many libertarians and Objectivists simply seem unable to appreciate the virtues of our federalist system; and that this is rejected implicitly when libertarians use ‘the government’ to refer to both state and federal government”.
Josh Wolf was a young video blogger who covered an anarchist protest in San Francisco. (On NPR I heard some of the footage--kids chanting “Smash the state! Smash the state!”) Apparently a police officer was injured and a cruiser burned. Since the cruiser was purchased with government money, the gov’t claimed it was a federal crime, and thus Wolf enjoyed no protections as a journalist.
In a long public life, Ron Paul has always kept faith with the limited defensible role for our federal government. He hasn’t sold out that vision to “buy” goodies extorted from others via government coercion, truly representing those disenchanted with the ballooning size scope of government. As a result, he has been criticized, including by those in his own party, for failing to “go along to get along” or look the other way at poorly thought out proposals and policies, both foreign and domestic.
[This article is excerpted from the first two chapters of The Enterprise of Law.]
The historian must be more than a chronicler, a mere lister of events. For his real task is discovering and setting forth the causal connections between events in human history, the complex chain of human purposes, choices, and consequences over time that have shaped the fate of mankind. Investigating the causes of such a portentous event as the American Revolution is more, then, than a mere listing of preceding occurrences; for the historian must weigh the causal significance of these factors, and select those of overriding importance.
Oh how one could wish this came from The Onion:
When I first read Chodorov’s Rise and Fall of Society, excerpted today as the Daily Article, I was just blown away at the clarity of argument and the precision of the analytics concerning government, society, and economy. How much could be achieved if a student read this one book sometime in the first years of college?
Ian Baldwin and Frank Bryan write in The Washington Post:
The winds of secession are blowing in the Green Mountain State.
Life without international trade: using local labor and materials only, a suit takes 500 man-hours to produce. And it’s not exactly high-quality. But what a great teaching project by Kelly Cobb of Drexel University.
Here’s the story from Wired.
Thank goodness for congressional committees, and the committees’ subcommittees. To think, Google almost got away with the crime of the century.
ABC News is reporting that “A congressional subcommittee accused Google on Friday of ‘airbrushing history’ by replacing post-Hurricane Katrina satellite imagery on its popular map portal with images of the region taken before the storm’s devastation.”
