Category: news Libertarianism
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Living on a school bus
With a $12,000 budget, a San Fransisco couple decided to turn a 39-foot school bus into a dream home – that sleeps ten people. To create their totally off-grid dwelling, Richard and Rachel, who run a blog, mounted six solar panels on the roof of the bus, installed a compost toilet, solar fridge and freezer and a propane-fed catalytic heater, stove and oven. Rachel, who says they live rent-free, paying just $100 per month for maintenance, admitted that family and friends were ‘confused’ by their decision. ‘My mom’s reaction was “this isn’t the sixties.” But as the duo explain on their blog, their dream was ‘to own our home, produce …
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Nipton – self-powered town in California
One of the world’s biggest solar power collectors is being built next to the tiny town of Nipton, Calif., which is ironic because Nipton is the closet thing to an off-grid town – with 85 per cent of its energy coming from a set of solar panels installed by one of its 60 residents. Gerald Freeman unlocks the gate to the small power plant and goes inside. Three rows of solar collectors, elevated on troughs that track the sun’s arc like sunflowers, afford a glimpse of California’s possible energy future. This facility and a smaller version across the road produce …
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US ambassador killed in Libya: Afghanistan bans YouTube over anti-Islam film
The Afghan government on Wednesday banned YouTube from the country for the first time to prevent people from watching an anti-Islam film, The Innocence of Muslims, which sparked a riot in Libya that killed the US ambassador and three other American diplomats.Read the rest hereThe Telegraph Judy Morris,Blogger, THLArticles | Website
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GM Loses Over $49,000 On Every Chevy Volt
Watching Phil LeBlow providing Ford with a reacharound this morning reminded us of total farce that is both the forest and the trees of the US auto industry. We have discussed the FUBAR channel-stuffing and the subprime-lending SNAFU but now, as Reuters reports , we see the ugly truth about GM’s little baby “the Volt is over-engineered and over-priced”. Nearly two years after the introduction of the path-breaking plug-in hybrid, GM is still losing as much as $49,000 on each Volt it builds. Furthermore, there are some Americans paying just $5,050 to drive around for two years in …
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Republican Use Dirty Tricks, Crack Down on Ron Paul and Gary Johnson in State Courts
The Republican Party is running scared. Either that or they think the country is better served by restricting voter choice to only those candidates they want to appear on the ballot. Could this be the same party that is supposed to totally support the Constitution and personal freedoms?Read the rest hereThe Liberty Crier Judy Morris,Blogger, THLArticles | Website
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Army Wants Tiny Suicidal Drone to Kill From 6 Miles Away
Killer drones just keep getting smaller. The Army wants to know how prepared its defense-industry partners are to build what it calls a “Lethal Miniature Aerial Munition System.” It’s for when the Army needs someone dead from up to six miles away in 30 minutes or less.Read the rest hereWired Judy Morris,Blogger, THLArticles | Website
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Iowa Surgeon Goes Galt
I love stories like this: As a solo general surgeon in private practice, in 2004, with a gross business income before taxes of roughly $500K, I figured that the 39.6{660353129f8d892044c993645a1c75194301fec6786a7f617c15adde0b0011e9} Federal + 9.98{660353129f8d892044c993645a1c75194301fec6786a7f617c15adde0b0011e9} Iowa state top income tax rates + 6{660353129f8d892044c993645a1c75194301fec6786a7f617c15adde0b0011e9} state sales + Medicare which no longer peaked out, + property taxes, medical license fees, malpractice fees which were already at $100K for me and headed higher, and no scholarship help for the 4 out of 10 kids in college at the time, my marginal rate was somewhere north of 70{660353129f8d892044c993645a1c75194301fec6786a7f617c15adde0b0011e9}. Once I ‘retired’ from surgery and became a biology professor, making around $50K, my gross income was one tenth as much, but now one of…
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Robert Poole on National Defense and Foreign Policy
Robert Poole is one of the founders of the Reason Foundation (which publishes Reason Magazine), and served as its president and CEO from 1978 to 2000. He is currently director of transportation policy at the Reason Foundation and frequently writes about issues related to privatization. In this video from a Libertarian International conference in 1984, Poole speaks about the moral frameworks surrounding national defense and foreign policy. He also goes into the means of national defense, including a lengthy discussion on nuclear armaments and nuclear shield programs.
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What are Negative and Positive Liberty? And Why does it Matter?
A significant amount of debate between libertarian and non-libertarian political thinkers has to do with the distinction between negative and positive liberty. These two technical terms within political philosophy play a large role in determining the limits of permissible state action, as well as establishing just what the state exists to do in the first place. Which means libertarians and non-libertarians interested in political ideas—and keen to having meaningful conversations about them—will benefit from understanding these two sorts of liberty. If we want to start very simple, keeping our definitions to just two words each, negative liberty means “freedom from,” while positive liberty means “capacity to.” Another way of thinking about the difference—though again, it’s a rough …
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Joan Kennedy Taylor: Pornography Versus Censorship
Joan Kennedy Taylor was a journalist, author, and political activist known for her advocacy of individualist feminism and her role in developing the modern American libertarian movement. She passed away in 2005. In this video from a Free Press Association conference in 1986, Taylor debates herself on pornography, obscenity, and censorship. She offers arguments for both sides and covers feminist interpretations of pornography, the protections afforded to free speech thanks to the First Amendment, and the history of the Supreme Court’s attempt to pin down the definition of “obscenity.”
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The Government Will Never End the Fed but the Fed is Destined to Die Anyway
Although the Republican controlled House of Representatives recently passed Audit the Fed, HR 459, Audit the Fed will never pass nor will the Fed ever be abolished legislatively. Republicans really do support the Federal Reserve because it funds their wars and empire. Furthermore, all the Republican YEA’s to Audit the Fed were nothing more than an act of political expediency because Republicans in Congress absolutely do understand that Audit the Fed stands no chance of ever getting out of the Senate where it only has 30 co-sponsors and could never survive a presidential veto.The Federal Reserve is the mother’s milk of empire, tyranny and statism. Big government and central banks exist …
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The Success of America’s Public School System
George H. Smith was formerly Senior Research Fellow for the Institute for Humane Studies, a lecturer on American History for Cato Summer Seminars, and Executive Editor of Knowledge Products. Smith’s fourth book, Themes in the History of Classical Liberalism, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press, and he is also a regular blogger and essayist at Libertarianism.org. In this video from a 1985 Libertarian Party of California conference Smith lectures on the success of the public school system. He claims that state schooling is successful insofar as it accomplishes it’s true goal: not to educate children per se but to turn them into civic-minded, obedient …
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Asking the Hard Questions
I have always thought of myself as a philosopher first, and a libertarian second. In my more self-congratulatory moments, I tell myself that this is because my highest commitment is to the truth, wherever it may lead, regardless of political program. To be honest, though, I think it largely comes down to personality. The fact is, being in a room full of people who all agree with each other—especially about politics—makes me profoundly uncomfortable. And that discomfort makes me start to question things. Put me in a room full of socialists, and I will start arguing for the virtues of a free market. But transport me to a room full of…
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Thoughts on Libertarian Strategy for the New Year
The advent of a new year is a good time—or at least as good a time as any—for libertarians to ponder their successes and failures. Given the dismal political developments over the past year, I thought this would be an appropriate time to offer some thoughts about strategies to achieve a free society. The word “strategy,” which derives from the Greek word for “office of a general,” originally referred to the art of military command “as applied to the overall planning and conduct of large-scale combat operations.” It is now used in a broader sense to mean the “art or skill of using stratagems in politics…
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Slavery Contracts and Inalienable Rights: A Formulation
by Roderick Long https://c4ss.org/content/16025 Slavery Contracts and Inalienable Rights: A Formulation Slavery Contracts and Inalienable Rights: A Formulation was originally published in the Winter 1994-95 issue of Formulations by the Free Nation Foundation, written by Roderick T. Long. Liberty vs. Self-Ownership? Libertarianism stands for maximum individual liberty — and thus against any kind of slavery. Yet libertarianism also stands for self-ownership; and what I own, I have a right to sell. Apparently, then, libertarianism countenances the legitimacy of selling oneself into slavery, and enforcing the slavery contract against those who change their minds. Thus it seems that the ideals of self-ownership and sanctity of contract can come into conflict with the ideal of maximum liberty…
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The New Joy of Gay Sex
From Free Life, Issue 19, November 1993 ISSN: 0260 5112 The New Joy of Gay Sex Dr Charles Silverstein and Edmund White The Gay Men’s Press, London, 1993, 220 pp., £16.95 (ISBN 0 85449 214 3) Reviewed by Sean Gabb I did think of turning this review into a plea for the toleration of sexual differences. But where homosexuals are concerned, I suspect I am about a decade too late. I will not claim that they have today no justified grievances. The criminal and civil law of this country embodies a mass of prejudice which ranges from the petty to the viciously destructive. Even so, the argument for removing that prejudice has been largely won …
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Briefly in Praise of Edward Gibbon
by Sean Gabb from 2000 It may have been observed that no issue of Free Life appeared between last October and January. The blame for this lapse is entirely mine, but the reason is Edward Gibbon. I opened the first volume of his Decline and Fall one Sunday afternoon in September, and closed the last volume early in December. During this time, almost every moment not reserved to earning a living or to the cares of married life was given up to reading Gibbon. I read him on railway trains and in the gaps between lectures. I read him in bed and once very furtively in the Church of St Mary le …
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Mars as it may once have been
Note: I dream of Mars several times a year. It’s always a bleak place, of dark shadows and a surface like the upper slopes of Mount Etna. Life, when present, is generally small and exo-skeletal. Otherwise, I often wander through vast cryogenic labyrinths underground, where the power has long since failed and the occupants have become shrivelled husks. I doubt these new pictures will find their way into my dream world – indeed, I like things the way they are – but they are interesting. SIG Filed under: Liberty
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Welcome to Russia: Putin Grants Citizenship to Depardieu
President Vladimir Putin has signed a decree granting Russian citizenship to French film star and tax exile Gerard Depardieu, who is renouncing his French citizenship to search for an easier tax climate outside of his native country. Academy Award-nominated Depardieu is a regular in Moscow. The actor made headlines across the world when he announced in late December that “Putin has already sent me a passport!” The statement was a joke, but it soon became reality. The day after the announcement, Putin told a press conference that the French bon vivant was a welcome guest in Russia: “If Gerard Depardieu really wants to have Russian …
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Is Capitalism Just Fraud?
By David J. Webb Located as I am in “rip-off Britain”, it is a worthy question indeed whether capitalism is, in the final analysis, just fraud. Businesses should try to sell their goods for the maximum price in the market—doesn’t that make it likely that the free market is just a conduit for deception? Libertarians are generally left with vague comments along the lines of caveat emptor that ignore the fact that good value and good service are hard to find in the market, whoever one buys from. So I think the question apposite and worth considering. Take the example of Chinese fake pharmaceuticals. I suppose you could say it is a case of caveat emptor—you should know that the drugs that you purchase…
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Of alarms, militias, and destiny
Recent works such as What you’ll see in the rebellion and Something funny happened on the way to the tyranny have brought many fresh new eyes to this outpost on the Internet. We are a nation on the cusp of repeating history. Anyone familiar with an accurate telling of the political truths leading up to
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Talking guns with Glenn Reynolds
Glenn had me on InstaVision to talk about the progressive calls for gun control. I completely whiffed on a chance to plug my related eBook. I need to fire my publicist, right after I fire my stylist, makeup artist, and yogi. Update: Now on Youtube as well.
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Boxes
At great personal cost, the Founding Father purchased a precious gift for us. They risked their lives, their homes, and their reputations and endured becoming traitors. They did so in order to throw off the chains of monarchy in order to preserve the freedoms given by God, which should never be constrained by man. After
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Climate change action: "The Science" gives way to "The Physics"…
Article by Libertarian Blog Place. Read entire story here.
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Obesity & ideology – Stumbling and Mumbling
Article by Libertarian Blog Place. Read entire story here.
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Ron Paul vs Spock: Will Politics or Parenting Set Us Free? – Freedomain: The Logic of Personal and Political Freedom
Article by Libertarian Blog Place. Read entire story here.
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Yaël Ossowski on How Disney Cashes In on Corporate Welfare – Hit & Run
Article by Libertarian Blog Place. Read entire story here.
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Union Workers *Probably* Torched a Quaker Meetinghouse Over Christmas – Hit & Run
Article by Libertarian Blog Place. Read entire story here.
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Welcome to Russia: Putin Grants Citizenship to Depardieu – The Libertarian Alliance: BLOG
Article by Libertarian Blog Place. Read entire story here.
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Quote of the Day
“As a prepper there may be situations where you want to come back and get them (magazines) but don’t get so paranoid about losing your magazine that you get yourself shot.” -Maine Prepper From his video Self defense chest rig and components.
