I just read that the parents of an autistic high school student arrested in a drug sting operation in Temecula, California last December have filed suit against the school district. The parents were “initially happy their son had made his first and only friend last year at school,” but became suspicious when his “school friend”…

In Washington, D.C., Fully Informed Jury Association activist James Babb has placed informative billboards at Metro stations near the courts. These billboards tell passersby about jury nullification, the ancient right of jurors to judge both the facts and the law. The doctrine has a long and venerable history; the right of juries to ignore the law…

The strongest argument in favor of the fiction of “intellectual property” is consequential rather than moral: Creators of good things — novels, songs, drugs, what have you — we are told, will essentially go on strike if government doesn’t guarantee their profits by vesting them with monopoly “rights” to ideas. Instead of writing that next…

This article won the 2011 Beth A. Hoffman Memorial Prize for Economic Writing. Although critics on the left are very astute in describing the evils of present-day society, they usually fail to understand either the root of those problems (government intervention) or their solution (the operation of a freed market). In Progressive commentary on energy,…

Of late I have been trying to balance my staunch support of the non-aggression principle (NAP) and self-ownership with my increasingly leftist values. For some anarchists the NAP and property rights are totally and wildly incompatible with anarchism, with the argument going so far to claim that stereotypical anarchism is rooted in a rejection of…

It’s impossible to make this stuff up, folks. Salon.com columnist Tom Watson, in an article on the upcoming “Stop Watching Us” rally in Washington, D.C., has excoriated all of his progressive friends for supporting something that libertarians — surprise! — also support. He writes, “Some of the biggest names in civil liberties and digital freedom…

In The Wealth of Nations Adam Smith famously wrote, “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the publick, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” It may seem strange that history’s best-known advocate of the free market would cast such aspersions on business…

Libertarianism has nothing to do with national interests. Libertarianism is about individual liberty. The liberty to live your own life, to pursue your own livelihood, and to come and go as you please to anywhere that’s open to you or anywhere you’re invited to go. The implications for immigration policy are obvious: Everyone – not…

Cory Doctorow, convidado de honra da vindoura convenção de ficção científica FenCon em Dallas, observa (“Durante o fechamento, alguns cientistas não podem falar acerca de ciência,” Boing Boing, 4 de outubro) que alguns de seus colegas palestrantes não poderão falar se o fechamento do governo continuar. Por eles serem cientistas espaciais do governo, estão enquadrados na…

L’utilité industrielle Dans les vastes plaines arides du Bassin Arckaringa, en Australie, a eu lieu une découverte majeure d’huile de schiste. Linc Energy a découvert sur 6,5 millions d’hectares de terrain environ 133 – 233 milliards de barils d’huile de schiste situés sous la lithologie de la région. Peu importe le volume d’huile accessible via la…

In their efforts to fight the Affordable Care Act, Republicans in Washington have “shut down” the Federal government to supposedly cut spending due to the costs of the health care legislation. On the first day of the shutdown most of us woke up, had coffee, and went to work. In other words, nothing had really…

Jon Hochschartner’s article in Salon on Saturday argues that the classic video game “The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time” is a mess of classist, racist, and sexist tropes. He will get no argument from me on the sexism score — the entire series is focused on rescuing the princess, again and again. But on the…

Throughout the US government “shutdown,” Democratic politicians have compared their Republican rivals to “anarchists” and argued that the “shutdown” proves government necessary. A recent speech by US Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) on the Senate floor exemplifies this trend. Misconceptions run rampant in Senator Warren’s speech. She conflates cooperation and government, stating “In our democracy, government is…

I’m hearing a lot of negativity — constructive negativity, but negativity nonetheless —  from my comrades on the libertarian left, concerning the US federal government’s “shutdown.” As the Center for a Stateless Society’s Kevin Carson notes with reference to “furloughed” government employees, “[S]ome of what government workers do — for example cops who enforce drug…

Cory Doctorow, guest of honor at the upcoming FenCon science fiction convention in Dallas, notes (“During the shutdown, some scientists can’t talk about science,” Boing Boing, October 4) that some of his fellow speakers will be unable to speak if the government shutdown continues. Because they’re government space scientists, they fall under the purview of the…

I should know better than to take seriously the insipid words of presidential speechwriters, especially those who composed an inaugural address. Still, I can’t let some of the words President Obama read at Monday’s inauguration pass without comment. For example, Obama said this: Preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action. For the American people can…

Em 399 antes da Era Cristã, pelo crime de “corromper os jovens” e debilitar a crença nos deuses tradicionais de Atenas, Sócrates foi sentenciado a beber taça de cicuta. Se o objetivo era silenciar a voz de Sócrates, é seguro dizer que o tiro saiu totalmente pela culatra. A história de Sócrates só fica em…

The tenets of the Tao Te Ching express the first anarchist or at least proto-anarchist political philosophy, to my knowledge. The Taoist opposition to government springs from a radical non-interventionist philosophy on all three major branches of philosophy. While Taoism rejects the normative, they recognize a sort of logic about the state of the universe,…

The government shutdown is teaching us a lot about the “public sector” — mainly that it doesn’t exist. For many folks Autumn is a season for getting out into the wild, for viewing fall colors, building camp fires, breathing in the still sweet air and plainly enjoying the great outdoors — “our” public lands. With…

The seemingly unbridgeable ideological gap in America between economic libertarians, on the one hand, and on the other, those who advocate various manners and degrees of redistribution of wealth can be rationally resolved through an understanding of the significance of the concepts of property rights and redistributive justice to those who advocated them in 1640’s…