Posner’s Catastrophes, and Ours

Richard Posner is widely described as a libertarian, but this is not the case, writes J.H. Huebert. And the latest of his many books, Catastrophe: Risk and Response, may be his most statist work yet, for it wants nothing more than to scare you into accepting bigger, ever-more-powerful government. It is part of a stream of recent work from University of Chicago court intellectuals advocating bigger government and explicitly attacking those who warn against trading liberty for security.

Libertarians of Will, Intellect, and Action

The first time online: Murray Rothbard’s stirring speech from 1977: “We hereby put everyone on notice: We are libertarians of the will as well as the intellect, of activity as well as theory, of real-world struggle as well as idealistic vision. We are a serious movement. Our goal is nothing less than the victory of liberty over the Leviathan state, and we shall not be deflected, we shall not be diverted, we shall not be suborned, from achieving that goal. The odds against us are no greater than the odds that faced our forefathers at Concord, at Saratoga, or at Valley Forge.”

Greenhouse gases, global warming, and the magnetic field

The local PBS station is due to rebroadcast the Nova program Magnetic Storm. The significance of the program is twofold. On one hand there is the prediction that Earth is long overdue for its magnetic poles to once again flip; north to south, south to north. On the other hand, and more ominous, there is the prediction that the Earth’s magnetic field is quickly fading away.

Truth in a Piston

There was never any absolute necessity for the machine, writes Garet Garrett. Life could exist without it, only, of course on a much smaller tapestry. It is use that creates the necessity for the machine. The scientific use of physical and mechanical knowledge to increase both the agricultural and the industrial means of life has made it possible in our time to sustain on the earth a population that could not otherwise exist, that would otherwise have perished before it was born. This is a fact we keep forgetting. It is the fact that relates human life to science in a vital sense.

Victo Hugo and Intellectual Property

In the copyright equivalent of mummies rising from the dead, Hugo heir plans to make life miserable for the ‘moneymaking’ author of sequel reports the attempt for the heirs of Victor Hugo to “ban a contemporary sequel to Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables for betraying the spirit of the 19th century classic.” Even though Les Misérables is in the public domain, Hugo’s great-great-grandson, Pierre Hugo, seeks to enforce dead Victor

Murder and Inflation: the Kentucky Tragedy

Following the Panic of 1819, the state of Kentucky sought to provide relief from the suddenly harsh burden of debt on many of its citizens, by creating the Bank of the Commonwealth, a new kind of bank, one completely owned by the state government and not at all bothered by specie, and by suspending foreclosure for up to two years upon the tender of paper money by debtors. Clifford Thies tells the story of inflation, economic collapse, political conflict, concern for the preservation of a republican form of government...and murder.
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