Tuesday, June 23, 2015

How It Works

Wherever government officials sense a credible threat to their power, they invariably take every opportunity to crush it by any means necessary: this is the first principle of how governments function, and every libertarian is all too familiar with it. The post-9/11 era has brought this lesson home, far beyond the relatively narrow confines of the libertarian movement. And this latest tragedy, you can be sure, will be used to accomplish the same anti-libertarian ends: the calls to investigate “hate groups,” and even to ban “hate speech,” are already being heard. Of course, who and what constitutes a “hate group,” and who is hating whom are subjective evaluations that no government official is qualified to make – not that this stops the largely left-wing proponents of such a dangerous idea, who cannot imagine that these pernicious proposals will ever be used to target them.

Click here to read the entire piece

Monday, June 8, 2015

John Galt's Speech

Even if you have never read Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" or seen the valiant attempt to make it into a 3-part movie, John Galt's speech,the heart and soul of Rand's novel, covers 56 pages in the paperback edition; it alone is worth the time to read. But in today's world of Instant Gratification, many who should won't make the effort. Many who should can't find the time. That's what made the movie - insufficient as it is to Rand's philosophy and prose - a work of art. Regardless of the critics, the viewer can at least get a whiff of what is there and may find a way to find the time.

For that hint of what lies within and beyond Atlas Shrugged , here is the edited essence of 
John Galt's Speech

No Comment Required

The array of ad hominems flung in the face of libertarian anarchists is astonishing. We are called utopian, simplistic, unrealistic, impractical, and unconstructive, at best, and quite commonly called idiotic, arrogant, ill-informed, stupid, malevolent, and even destructive. A man from Mars listening to these calumnies might be forgiven for supposing that libertarian anarchists are very bad people, indeed.
Yet we are not the ones who willingly support and justify the rapacious state under which everyone except the privileged few is now plundered economically and debauched morally. We are not the ones who've approved the slaughter of millions of human beings in unnecessary foreign wars, the imprisonment of millions in the USA for victimless crimes, the ruin of entire subgroups of the population by means of welfare dependency, the miseducation of generation after generation in government schools, where the children are fed propaganda and political correctness with delicate concern for their self-esteem but no concern for their ability to add, subtract, multiply, and divide numbers. We are not the ones who have voted into office corrupt politicians in one election after another, expressing shock when one of them is episodically revealed to be the kind of scumbag that, in reality, nearly all of them are. We are not the ones who've supported the unjust redistribution of income in a thousand different programs and projects and the destruction of wealth through political machinations that create regime uncertainty, placing private property rights at incalculable risk and paralyzing investors and entrepreneurs who might otherwise drive rapid economic growth. We are not the ones . . . well, the litany might be extended indefinitely.
Surveying this sordid vista, well might one ask, Who are the truly foolish, destructive, and malevolent people in the USA

h/t Robert HIggs