"Better to be cast out of the Church than to deny Christ."
"What is the difference between a taxidermist and a tax collector? The taxidermist takes only your skin." — Mark Twain
The requirement for marriage licenses in the U.S. has been justified on the basis that the state has an overriding right, on behalf of all citizens and in the interests of the larger social welfare, to protect them from disease or improper/illegal marriages; to keep accurate state records; or even to ensure that marriage partners have had adequate time to think carefully before marrying.
Honest Abe and FDR behaved much like each other in the intervals preceding their respective wars, and economic factors played a large part in the decisions to go to war.
. . . I’m not so sure that I can recall any government official pleading the constraints of law or the constraints of reality to what can and cannot be done. No aspect of life is untouched by government intervention, and often it takes forms we do not readily see. All of healthcare is regulated, but so is every bit of our food, transportation, clothing, household products, and even private relationships. . . . This nation, conceived in liberty, has been kidnapped by the fascist…
David Gordon has a review of Neoconservatism: An Obituary for an Idea, on Mises Daily: C. Bradley Thompson [the book's author, a Randian Objectivist] … argues that neoconservatism stands in fundamental opposition to individual rights and a free economy. Although neoconservatives have indeed challenged certain aspects of the welfare state, they have no quarrel with it in principle. . . . . [then] why do the neoconservatives criticize the welfare state at all? Aside from the technical deficiencies of particular programs, what concerns them is…
The so-called “Internet Reformation” is a hopeful alternative to business as usual, for both the purveyors of political facts and even traditional fiction publishers: Over the last few years, the publishing world has begun to change drastically. As with the music industry in recent times, people no longer need large firms to get published. With the rise of the e-book and print-on-demand services, a writer can now circumvent the traditional system and release their work directly to the public themselves. — Reagen Dandridge Desilets A…
By Mike Gray I enjoy reading libertarian thinkers; they have much to contribute to economic theory. But a recent article by Llewellyn Rockwell on Mises Daily highlights the deficiencies of libertarian thought, while confirming the veracity of Emerson’s “foolish consistency” being “the hobgoblin of little minds”—and, on a personal note, reaffirming why I am not and never will be a libertarian. There are different brands of libertarians; if I read him right, Rockwell seems to be an exponent of the “anarcho-capitalist” branch—and if I understand…
By Mike Gray Odonianism is anarchism. Not the bomb-in-the-pocket stuff, which is terrorism, whatever name it tries to dignify itself with; not the social-Darwinist economic ‘libertarianism’ of the far right; but anarchism as prefigured in early Taoist thought, and expounded by [Percy] Shelley and [Peter] Kropotkin, [Emma] Goldman and [Paul] Goodman. Anarchism’s principal target is the authoritarian State (capitalist or socialist); its principal moral-practical theme is cooperation (solidarity, mutual aid). It is the most idealistic, and to me the most interesting, of all political theories.…
By Mike Gray The Jetsons’ world is our world: explosive technological advances, entrenched bourgeois culture, a culture of enterprise that is the very font of the good life. But there is one major difference, and it isn’t the flying car, which we might already have had were it not for the government promotion of roads and the central plan that manages transportation. It is this: we also live in the midst of a gigantic leviathan state that seeks to control every aspect of our life…
By Mike Gray [A] human being is endowed with free will. He can use this to choose between good and evil. If he can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is a clockwork orange — meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil or (since this is increasingly replacing both) the Almighty State. — Anthony Burgess On the Mises…
By Mike Gray “Novels, especially science-fiction novels, have been an important means of spreading the word where libertarianism is concerned. They will continue to be an important means of getting our ideas out.” — Jeff Riggenbach Eric S. Raymond has written that science fiction (SF) . . . has a bias towards valuing the human traits and social conditions that best support scientific inquiry and permit it to result in transformative changes to both individuals and societies. Also, of social equilibria which allow individuals the…
By Mike Gray Jeffrey A. Tucker points to a “great error” that proponents of economic and social freedom often make, that of “thinking that big government and big business are somehow at odds,” when reality and experience show otherwise. Such fuzzy thinking, says Tucker, rests upon a “caricature of capitalism: the belief that it is the system that favors the largest and most established capital owners in society”: The whole of American history from the beginning to the present suggests precisely the opposite. From Alexander…
“The Great Emancipator” may have also been “The Great Centralizer”: The Lincoln regime destroyed the system of federalism, or states’ rights, that was established by the founding fathers. After the war, the union was no longer voluntary, and all states, North and South, became mere appendages of Washington, D.C. Lincoln illegally suspended the writ of habeas corpus and imprisoned tens of thousands of political dissenters without due process; waged total war with the bombing, plundering, and mass murder of some 50,000 of his own citizens;…
by Mike Gray The theme of novels and plays is individual man as he lives, feels, and acts, and not anonymous collective wholes. The milieu is the background of the portraits the author paints; it is the state of external affairs to which the characters respond by moves and acts. There is no such thing as a novel or play whose hero is an abstract concept such as a race, a nation, a caste, or a political party. Man alone is the perennial subject of…
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