Intellectuals, particularly academic intellectuals, tend to favor socialism and interventionism. How was the American university transformed from a center of higher learning to an outpost for socialist-inspired culture and politics?
[This article is excerpted from chapter 7 of How Capitalism Saved America.]
The neverending quest to protect (for our own good that is) us from the evils of online gambling seems to be quite fruitful. The latest news is about an arrest, made at an airport no less, of a chairman of a gamling company from other country.
In this post I reprinted a letter to the editor that I sent to a patent lawyer trade journal, IP Today, in which I responded to the comments of a patent attorney to the effect that “the patent system is necessary for there to be invention and innovation.” I explained that
It’s political season again, and what a show it is. Politicians specialize in this. They affect a know-it-all posture and carry a bag of solutions to every problem, natural, human, and divine. They work to perfect the ability to fob off their solutions as sound reasoning even when they are snake oil or sheer poison. Still, one can only marvel at how successful they are at bamboozling the population.
This is rich. Brazilian central bank employees have gone on strike to press for a 23 percent wage increase to compensate for inflation that has taken place since June 2008. HT to Mark Thornton.
Now this puts Progressive Era economists in their proper light!
When the Civil War came, many abolitionists, including William Lloyd Garrison, abandoned their traditional anti-war, anti-state stance to support the Northern cause, in the hope that a Union victory would bring a quicker end to slavery. One abolitionist who stuck to his anti-war position and defended Southern secession was Ezra Heywood; his critique of the Garrisonian position is now online here. Commentary here.
Actual Ethics. By James R. Otteson. Cambridge University Press, 2006. Xviii + 349 pgs.
The title of James Otteson’s book is, I am sure unintentionally, misleading. Readers might expect a dry and abstract philosophical treatment of ethics. In fact, what Otteson offers is a full-scale defense of classical liberalism.
I often tire of people asking (usually in a self-contradictory, petulant tone, more demanding than asking), “Okay, so what is the source of rights?! Where do they ‘come from’?!” My reply is usually that the questioner either respects my rights, or he does not. If he does not, he can go to h*ll—I’m not wasting time talking to an uncivilized thug, any more than I would treat with a rampaging elephant, bandit, lion, or hurricane. And if he does respect rights—then my stance is: how dare you demand of me that I justify your own views?
