Young Americans

The Ron Paul-inspired youth organization Young Americans for Liberty gets a new website. The neocons have colonized the campuses almost as effectively as the Left. YAL provides a constitutionalist alternative to both. Check ‘em out.

Hate Crimes and Harmful Content

The truly deplorably tendency to regulate behavior by codifying and punishing inappropriate views as “hate crimes” will no doubt accelerate after the killing of the abortion doctor in Kansas and the Holocaust museum guard in Washington.  What is worse, perhaps, is private sector attempts to anticipate such legislation by purging themselves of all objectionable content.  [...]

Shill.He.Is

The single most distressing result of Barack Obama’s election is not the looting of your grandchildren’s economic prospects to pay for the new administration’s Great Lurch Forward into insolvency. It isn’t the accompanying loss of liberty. Nor is it the mass decampment of “anti-war” leftists now silent or openly supporting the escalation of the war [...]

Race and the Drug War

Last Friday, Jonah Goldberg wrote a post at The Corner arguing that there is something “unlibertarian” about opponents of drug prohibition who use claims about the drug war’s disproportionate effects on blacks in an attempt to demonstrate its injustice. This post prompted a lengthy response from Reason’s Jacob Sullum, who helpfully [...]

Burt Blumert, Rest in Peace

Burt Blumert, founder of the Center for Libertarian Studies and an indispensable help in getting Antiwar.com and LewRockwell.com (and many other anti-war, anti-state projects) off the ground, died this morning. Here’s Eric Garris’s remembrance. And here’s Lew Rockwell’s.
Blumert was an uproariously funny public speaker, and equally good on the printed page. His Bagels, Barry Bonds, [...]

The Corporate Myth of Free Trade

It’s a bit amazing in these days of burgeoning state control of the economy, but you still hear politicians–the same ones who foisted corporate-welfare stimulus and bailout plans on us–cursing protectionism and singing odes to free trade.
To be fair, many free-trade defenders these days are real laissez-faire types fighting to prevent yet another assault on [...]

Not From The Onion

(And not tears of laughter) The mobility of labor is becoming the forced march of labor: IBM offers help to displaced workers.

Herbert Spencer at Delmonico’s

Bill Kauffman on the great, but much maligned, Victorian anti-statist.

Ron Paul and Reason

Sean, although I wish Reason’s coverage of the Paul campaign had been more positive (I worked in the campaign’s press shop, so I don’t claim to be objective here), there are several things that have to be kept in mind. For one, David Weigel is a reporter first and a libertarian second: if he’s assigned [...]

The Ron Paul Generation

Back when the conservative movement was actually conservative (though not without its problems, to be sure) it was in significant part a youth movement. Students for Goldwater was instrumental in pushing the Arizona senator — even against his wishes — for the Republican nomination in 1960. That fall, the core of the Students for Goldwater [...]