And is one of the more stupid things I’ve seen this week.

“Please read the following, and SIGN THIS PETITION my brother xxxxxx has created! As we move into a world with such reliance on technology, it is imperative we create an atmosphere that can support it, and protect our rights simultaneously. 

‘I’ve started a White House petition on the subject, and if it gets 150 signatures, it’ll go public. If it gets 25,000, the petition will be forwarded to the White House.

I think a solution to the debate could be an overhaul of the USPS to create an optional email system that is covered by the same protections that apply to our paper mail. 

but innocent people in middle eastern countries certainly lost the debate.

whakahekeheke:

Essential Reading

1. A Brief History of Human Society: Property versus the State (or better, the essay this post is based on)
2. Bite-size case for freedom (from professor Kling)
3. How democracy undermines social tolerance and diversity (excerpts of Taylor)
4. Mills on design and compromise
5. ‘PEOPLE NOT PROFITS’ is backwards (Blunt Object)
6. “A Positive Account of Property Rights” by David Friedman
7. ‘Property and Its Enemies’ by Anthony de Jasay (excerpts)
8. Institutional Economics: Private Property Rights in Land Predate the State
9. Cowen & Tabarrok on the organic reemergence of property in communist China
10. Good arguments against libertarianism vs. Dumb arguments against libertarianism

On freedom

• Victor Hugo: “the most precious possession of all mankind” 
• Isaiah Berlin on our fundamental sense of freedom
• Hayek on our ordinary language concept of “freedom”
• Jan Lester on how our concept of liberty implies libertarianism
• Hayek on “negative” liberty
• Kolakowski on ideologues and the concept of freedom

Philosophy in the popular sense

• Can life have meaning?
• What to do with your time on Earth, according to MS Rulle
• Rainer Maria Rilke on the value of difficulty
• “The real damage is done by those millions who…”
• In the fire of fairytales, Chesterton reminds us of our foundation
• My rambling about religion, atheism, objectivity
• everything is ok
• How do you know you (or anything else) exist? (video)

On libertarianism

• What does ‘libertarian’ mean?
• A student’s Marxist professor told her that “market society is coercive” as people must “join the market or starve.” The student asked me how I would respond…
• Thomas Paine on spontaneous order
• Actual libertarians vs. Strawmen (gif)
• What libertarians are saying vs. What people misunderstand it to mean
• Thomas Jefferson’s Anti-Statist Sentiment
• Gandhi on the state, capitalism, private ownership, and the libertarian ideal
• Clarifying Rothbard and self-ownership
• Bill Hicks on the nonaggression principle
• William F. Buckley on libertarianism
• Bertrand Russell on libertarians
• Mencken on liberty vs. democracy

Milton Friedman & David Friedman

• “The Nonexistence of the Ruling Class” by David Friedman (excerpt from MOF)
• David Friedman on the feasibility of ideal socialism
• What Milton Friedman thought was “the strongest argument for free enterprise”
• David’s speech about private law illustrated in RSA type video
• David Friedman on choosing a politician vs. choosing a car
• Milton Friedman on ending the Fed
• Milton Friedman looking at money
• Milton Friedman on his difference with policy Keynesians
• David Friedman on old ladies with guns
• David Friedman on special interest politics

Friedrich Hayek

• Do you understand boilerplate Hayek?
• Einstein vs. Einstein & Hayek on capitalism and self-interest
• FA Hayek on the origin of large, centralized corporations in modern economies
• Hayek: good fences make good neighbors
• on preventing the abuse of power
• on common values necessary for maintaining freedom
• Hayek on what’s wrong with “collectivism,” also Nietzsche’s Zarathustra

Anthony de Jasay

• Anthony de Jasay on redistributionist “social contract” theory
• on the logic of political power
• on the utopian idealism of anti-state libertarians
• De Jasay: game theory of intergroup violence
• on economic method
• ‘A Conversation with Anthony de Jasay’ (audio, 2000)
• on the last refuge of contemporary socialism
• Social Justice: Abolish Luck! (de Jasay)

Friedrich Nietzsche

• ‘Socialism, the Tyranny of the Least and the Dumbest: the Misappropriation of Friedrich Nietzsche’ by N. Buccola, and comment
• on the doctrine of equality
• Nietzsche’s definitive comment on the state in Zarathustra: it’s more cerebral and positivistic than you probably realise
• on the self-defeat of liberalism
• Who did Nietzsche hate the most?
• on the labor theory of value and other economics stuff
• Nietzsche’s economic argument for property and against socialism
• Nietzsche critiques historical injustice argument against property
• Nietzsche describes and comments on anarcho-capitalism
• on atheist statists
• on how popular beliefs affect institutions
• Nietzsche makes a case for Hayekian law
• Did Nietzsche believe that socialists et al. really care about justice?
• Isaiah Berlin critiques the romantics Stirner and Nietzsche
• Chesterton on Nietzsche

Albert Camus

• Albert Camus talking about economics and inflation
• Camus on the Left
• on the nature of freedom
• on Marx and “private property” vs. “collective property” in The Rebel (1951)
• on politics
• on the origin of evil
• on money and happiness
• on the libertarian tradition vs. the Caesarian socialist tradition
• on logic and psychology in Myth of Sisyphus
• Albert Camus, Neither Victims Nor Executioners

Michel Foucault

• Foucault on what we should do now 
• Foucault: Critic of Statism and Socialists (excerpts from a journal article by M. Behrent on Michel Foucault’s effective embrace of neoliberalism)
• on Marxism
• When Foucault changed his mind about neoliberal “freedom”
• on the importance and unimportance of the state
• on how to better frame the discussion of power and hierarchy
• Foucault’s final project
• Saul Newman on Foucault and libertarianism
• Allen on Foucault’s particular brand of liberalism
• Patton of Foucault’s ‘endorsement’ of neoliberal governmentality

George Orwell

• Orwell on (inevitable) socialism vs. the economic liberty
• A youngish George Orwell on what socialism is
• Orwell’s review of Hayek’s Road to Serfdom

Christopher Hitchens

• Hitchens on hierarchy and left-anarchists: “a lineage of losers”
• Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens on ‘left-vs-right’
• Hitchens on the beginnings of emancipation
• on Djilas on Hayek
• on “the real struggle” for humanity
• on race
• Hitchens the hunter

Ludwig Wittgenstein

• Wittgenstein on logic and contradiction
• on “value” in social science and ethical theory
• on human action
• Roger Scruton on Wittgenstein on human action
• Dewi Zephaniah on what Wittgenstein does to political philosohers
• Wittgenstein’s rule-following: methodologically individualistic or collectivistic?
• on the greatest possible cry of torment
• Wittgensteinians in Ancient China: Cheng-tzu on language
• Wittgenstein’s appraisal of Bertrand Russel’s later work
• on nonsense philosophical ethics
• on logic in three key sections of Philosophical Investigations
• how “deep” philosophy is

Economics and method

• Vernon Smith on behavioral economics and the rationality assumption
• So why shouldn’t everything be organized into individual private property units?
• My disagreement with Austrian economic methodology, and Rothbard vs. Hayek
• Voltaire on self-interest
• Why is economics called ‘the dismal science’?
• H.L. Mencken reviews Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class
• Economic analysis of surfing (on the ocean) also the big wave at Teahupoo
• The economics of inter-bacterial communication
• Malik & Awadallah, “The Economics of the Arab Spring,” Oxford, 2011
• On happiness research and the Easterlin paradox
• free market economist Paul Krugman

Ronald Coase

• Coase in EEL
• on the consistent empirical crappiness of state regulations
• Ronald Coase vs. Paul Samuelson

On stateless societies and the non-state provision of typically state services

• Inequality and property rights in stateless societies: the case of Ifugao
• The Economist on the stateless micro-multinational corporation
• Welfare Without the Welfare State, Yale Brozen
• ‘Law, police, and courts without the state’ by David Friedman (excerpt from MOF)
• Hmong Means Free
• Tibet and its stateless history
• Zomia: southeast Asian stateless society
• How Government Solved the Healthcare Crisis, by Roderick Long

On the anthropology of state formation 

• Henri Claessen’s definition of the state in The Encyclopedia of Cultural Anthropology
• Manicas “The Legitimation of the Modern State: A Historical and Structural Account”
• Henri Claessen, Structural Change: Evolution and Evolutionism in Cultural Anthropology (Lieden University, 2000) Excerpt I Excerpt II Excerpt III Excerpt IV Excerpt V
• T. Earle on how chiefs come to power
• Hallpike on violence leading to institutions
• Elman R. Service, Origins of the State and Civilization: The Process of Cultural Evolution

On statism

• Adam Smith on statist interventionists Excerpt 1 Excerpt 2
• An effective “universal right to healthcare” is impossible. excerpt of Danny Frederick
• The “war on drugs” y consecuencias no buscadas
• CJ Friedrich’s “The Deification of the State” in Review of Politics II
• Jens Bartelson, The Critique of the State (Cambridge, 2001)
• Anonymous’ message to the governments of the industrial world
• Roderick Long on contemporary political discourse 

On slavery

• Equiano on freed slaves who preferred slavery (1789)
• A most shocking fact in American history
• Slavery, abolition, self-ownership, and libertarianism

On socialism

• Roemer & Hodgson on the history of the concept of socialism
• Hayek on what is left of socialism, intellectually speaking
• Hayek on the ideals on the socialism
• History of “socialism” and “individualism” in Western thought —G Hodgson
• Kolakowski on the reality of socialism as an alternative society to capitalism
• the definition of “socialism” in the widely read textbook Political Economy (1883)
• Mencken on the efficient man, inefficient man, and the greatest objection to socialism
• Igor Shafarevich, The Socialist Phenomenon (1975) Excerpt I Excerpt II

On “left-libertarianism,” mutualism, Georgism, leftism, etc.

• On ‘left-libertarianism’ and ‘right-libertarianism’
• Kinsella vs. confused ‘left-libertarians’: corporations in the mixed economy
• There is not such thing as “rent” … contra mutualism, Georgism, etc
• Why mutualism is capitalistic, not socialistic in common terminology. And Benjamin tucker on private property
• Mutualist economics is poopy Part I Part II Part III Part IV Part V
• Mutualism = poor arguments for ancapism
• Response to c4ss: ‘Is market anarchism derived from classical liberalism or socialism?’
• Does ‘the state’ include teh evil corporations?
• Bastiat on Proudhon’s dialetical logic
• Kolakowski on Proudhon
• Auberon Herbert on property in land: libertarianism vs. Georgism (or vulgar mutualism or socialism)
• Freedom in the context of reality vs. weneverjumpship’s “mutualism”
• Chesterton on uninformed reformers and revolutionaries

On typical “anti-capitalists” and new communists and that whole crowd

• Repeal Citizens United! Get money out of politics! (Blunt Object)
• Is Parecon (“participatory direct democratic planning”) an alternative to free market capitalism? -G Hodgson and Monty Python’s The Life of Brian
• Captain America
• Malthusians who masquerade as Marxists: what do they mean by ‘neoliberalism’? 
• The Economist on Naomi Klein
• Very funny comments about David Graeber’s Debt book
• Graeber’s errors and misunderstanding of economics
• Zizek vs. Graeber on the uselessness of existing leftism
• (Taxation = Profit = Theft)? reply to anticapitalist
• Mao or Chomsky?

On Marxism

• Annie Besant vs. Karl Marx (on value theory)
• Kolakowski on ‘the skeleton of Marxism’
• ‘Analytical Marxism’ isn’t very Marxist
• Dos Passos on his Marxist friend Xavier and socialism’s disconnect with everyday life
• EO Wilson on blank slate Marxists Excerpt I Excerpt II
• Alexander Gray on Marx and Hegelianism

On literature

• Robin Hanson on Death of a Salesman and critiques of “capitalism”
• ‘A Little Fable’ by Franz Kafka
• On talking about ‘libertarian fiction’ or ‘libertarian art’ etc.
• a Wendell Berry poem
• Goethe on commerce vs. culture
• Walt Whitman’s Brooklyn Eagle libertarianism Excerpt I Excerpt II
• Hollbrook on libertarian individualist themes in Shakespeare
• Anti-statism in Gulliver’s Travels
• 20 good libertarian novels
• Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (1978); final sentence

SCIENCE

• Murmuration video
• the global transition to agriculture, group selection pressures, unfalsifiable claims, human evolution, New Guinea
• K. Laland, et al. ”How culture shaped the human genome: bringing genetics and the human sciences together” in Nature (February 2010) Excerpt I Excerpt II
• Jesús Mosterín, “Kolmogorov Complexity” in Complexity and Emergence (2003)
• J. Hawks, et al. “Recent acceleration of human adaptive evolution,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2008)

On science vs. scientism

• Grimmel on neuroscience vs. neuroscientism
• Nietzsche on scientism
• Hilary Putnam on scientism
• Chris Norriz critiques Stephen Hawking on philosophy, atheism, and science

On social justice, feminism, institutional racism, etc.

• Shorter on free markets and historical female empowerment
• Steven Pinker on something that most gender feminists (and tumblr-social-justice types) do not understand: the distinction between difference and discrimination
• Intergroup differences and the concept of race
• institutional racism
• Equalitarian ‘Social Justice’ culturism versus Biology 101
• Social Justice: Abolish Luck! (de Jasay)

Misc below

Read More

In fifty years, remember this day as another major stepping stone towards loss of liberty in the United States.

Q: How does it feel to be a Libertarian?

A: Cassandra