Back in 1974, the newly-formed Libertarian Party adopted what’s now called the “Dallas Accord.” The Dallas Accord was intended to make the LP platform compatible with both minarchism and anarchism by keeping the LP officially silent on whether or not governments should exist, in the end; hence the platform focused mainly on what ought to be repealed,…

The United States and Russia appear to have reached an agreement over the conflict in Syria. The powers have adopted a diplomatic resolution to bring Syrian chemical weapons under international control. For now, this development has calmed the rhetorical march to war as it is now unlikely to see a U.S. military strike on Syria in the…

On September 4th, my op-ed Chelsea Manning and the State’s Abusive Transphobia was published as a letter to the editor in Urban Tulsa Weekly. The paper treated it as a “really convoluted counterpoint” to an asinine letter by Oklahoma State Senator Frank Simpson, who argued that Chelsea Manning was not a hero. State Senator Simpson…

Recently someone on an email discussion list I follow pointed out that authors or publishers of copyrighted pieces may be reliant on royalty income for their subsistence. The alternative to proprietary information might be that “only people with income from other sources (such as academic salaries) [would] be able to make their voices heard.” I…

Bigotry and racism are oppressive ideas that run afoul of individualist ideals. Anti-Arab racism and anti-Muslim bigotry are two forms of bigotry that have for at least the past decade been used to justify a litany of criminal acts of tyranny and state violence. The New York Police Department has “designated entire mosques ‘terrorism enterprises’ in…

The Constitution did not keep President Obama from attacking Syria. The people did. Think about that. Obama, his top advisers, and many of his partisans and opponents in Congress insist that the president of the United States has the constitutional authority to attack another country without a declaration of war or so-called “authorization for the…

Obama y Kerry no proponen una guerra. Usarán misiles crucero para masacrar sirios y, si no les gusta la reacción siria, podrían enviar tropas terrestres. Especuladores de la guerra como Raytheon se beneficiarán. Pero el Secretario de Estado insistirá en que no es una guerra. ¿Cuándo una guerra no es una guerra? Según John Kerry,…

The Argument for Market Failure A public good, as economists define the concept, is any good from whose enjoyment non-contributors cannot be excluded. The theory of public goods is of interest to libertarians for two reasons: first, because a great many things we care about – highways, education, law enforcement, fire protection, national defense, etc. – are widely thought…

C4SS Trustee and Senior Fellow, Gary Chartier, gave the talk “Achieving Social Justice Through Liberty” at the University of Oklahoma. http://youtu.be/yYGYH3eC5yI Q&A: http://youtu.be/81uWXAiTC0k

Robert Reich (“Syria and the Reality at Home in America,” Nation of Change, September 7), noting that the share of the population either working or seeking work was at a thirty-year low, writes “A decent society would put people to work — even if this required more government spending on roads, bridges, ports, pipelines, parks…

A few days ago, US Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY) recycled his familiar contention that “[w]hat enables [the United States’] war-friendly philosophy is the fact that there is no military draft to dodge.” Yoking ordinary people to the decisions of the political class, he argues, would somehow disincentivize U.S. bellicosity abroad. In tandem with Rangel’s proposal…

In his classic essay, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” F.A. Hayek explains the concept of distributed knowledge. Every individual has unique knowledge shaped by their experiences and preferences, knowledge that may not be accessible to others, no matter how well educated they may be. Hayek writes: “Today it is almost heresy to suggest that…

Tenha ou não ditador sírio Bashar al-Assad usado armas químicas, o Presidente Obama não tem base legítima para intervir. Ataques aéreos dos Estados Unidos, visantes a punir e a dissuadir Assad e a degradar sua instituição militar, mas não a derrubar seu regime, aumentariam o investimento dos Estados Unidos na guerra civil síria e tornariam…

In the debate on Syria, progressive pundits are letting us know that do-gooders can’t be peaceniks. Recently, pro-war commentators on liberal media outlets have greatly outnumbered the doves, with MSNBC leading the way. These humanitarian interventionists understand what the most famous progressives of all time made clear, that the obligation to rescue the unfortunate comes with an obligation to…

Forbes contributor psychiatrist Dale Archer asks whether America’s wealth gap could lead to a revolt. Highlighting recent fast food workers’ strikes and the struggle for a “living wage,” Archer observes that “disparity between the nation’s top earners and the bottom 80 percent has grown exponentially over the past three decades, and it’s been exacerbated by…

The civil war in Syria and the implications for the United States government’s involvement is hot on the lips of most political analysts these days. The recent chemical attacks on civilians in Syria have ignited military interventionist rhetoric on the part of the Obama administration, but with an overwhelming number of people polled opposing such…

When you take a big dose of syrup of ipecac, you get a big stream of projectile vomiting. And when someone calls for a living wage, you get a nice big vomit stream from the usual suspects on the Right, denouncing such calls on the basis of what they call “hard-headed economic rationality.” Response to…

The Obama administration has announced the formation of a panel of “outside experts” to review the NSA’s surveillance practices. And a wide-ranging, diverse collection of experts they are; when it comes to institutional backgrounds and viewpoints, they span the entire spectrum from A to B. They remind me a bit of the space shuttle crew…

Across the world, people are protesting against US intervention in Syria. Polls show widespread skepticism of the impending war. Rather than making Americans safer, intervention is likely to support forces connected to al Qaeda. Yet it still seems inevitable that the US government will launch cruise missiles at Syria, escalating the country’s bloody civil war….

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said that when a garment gets so old, attempting to patch it with new cloth will just tear it up worse. The authoritarian state seems to be reaching that point, beyond which any attempt to patch it up or prolong its life just inflict new damage and hasten…