According to many economists, the state is warranted in taxing individuals to provide public goods because a free market in these services (e.g., streetlights) would produce a suboptimal supply. This public goods argument is fatally flawed, for it proves far too much, such as the government should pay pretty girls to go out into the street, for they too are public goods. Such a policy is totally unacceptable. A liberal society must therefore reject the public goods argument—and with it the primary grounds for support for the state provision of streetlights.

“We are the makers of our own fate,” said Christian Lindner (FDP, Free Democratic Party), German federal minister of finance, in a TV interview not too long ago. This statement was made in the context of being asked if Vladimir Putin had had a hold over Germany, considering its rather dire energy situation, now, but especially going into winter.

Come next January, Alabama will be the twenty-fifth state to allow concealed carry without a permit. Alabama will soon join Indiana, which in March of this year passed a new statute allowing permitless concealed carry—sometimes called “constitutional carry.” In 2021 alone, at least six states passed their own provisions legalizing permitless concealed carry: Arkansas, Iowa, Montana, Tennessee, Texas, and Utah. Essentially, any law-abiding citizen over a certain age (usually eighteen or twenty-one) can now carry a concealed firearm in these states.

I’ve always cared for the environment. I was indoctrinated into it, and during my university career wrote all my lecture notes on the back of discarded “misprints” from the library. Why waste?

Nonetheless I cringe and cringe at token efforts to reduce plastic waste by putting mandatory charges on shopping bags while almost everything we pick up from supermarket shelves are coated in plastic wrapping! Listen guys - we all wanna save the world, but we ain’t gonna do it by banning plastic straws.

As you might suspect, I don’t think so, but the philosopher Gregory Salmieri is decidedly of a different opinion, and in this week’s article, I’d like to examine some of his arguments on this topic in his thoughtful essay “Objectivism,” published in The Routledge Companion to Libertarianism (pp. 82–101).