It could become very difficult to get in the near future, if we see the political class follow up on the latest frenzy: “Teens turn to cough syrup to get high, Feds say.”
“It’s bad that kids are buying cough syrup and using it this way — it’s not good for them,” said John P. Walters, director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.
An excellent piece by Michael Malone in the WSJ today (thanks S. Berger):
Given a fate of living under the magnifying glasses of SOX and FD, who in their right mind would want to sit on a corporate board these days? The smart board-level people I know in Silicon Valley now reduce their involvement to being merely corporate “advisers.” Thus, the intellectual capital of America’s high tech company boards is falling by the month.
This morning’s New York Times business page reports that Toyota is expected to replace Ford as the second-best selling automobile manufacturer in the United States next month. This is a significant event in the auto industry. Ford has held the No. 2 spot since the 1920s.
In attempting to outline how a “society without a state” — that is, an anarchist society — might function successfully, I would first like to defuse two common but mistaken criticisms of this approach. First, is the argument that in providing for such defense or protection services as courts, police, or even law itself, I am simply smuggling the state back into society in another form, and that therefore the system I am both analyzing and advocating is not “really” anarchism.
[The Old Curmudgeon was a regular feature of Murray Rothbard’s Libertarian Forum. Here are his New Year’s wishes for the libertarian movement in the December 1975 issue, available in PDF.]
From The Old Curmudgeon
Ethernet pioneer Bob Metcalfe recently gave a free-market-esque speech at an energy summit in Massachusetts. Below are a couple of choice quotes. Note: FOCACA stands for freedom of choice among competing alternatives:
My school offers two main elective history courses for seniors: Government and Economics. Due to scheduling limitations, not many kids are able to take both. I’ve noticed something interesting as the year has progressed. The students who are taking the government course are increasingly endorsing leftist ideologies while the economics students are becoming increasingly right wing.
[This article is excerpted from the first 5 chapters of The Ethics of Liberty. Listen to the MP3 version.]
