Yeah, like let's blame libertarians

Reason Magazine:

A similar thing happened to me over the weekend. I twisted my ankle playing pick-up basketball. As I clenched my jaw in pain, I could only look up to the sky, shake my fist angrily, and curse the name Robert Nozick.

Read the whole entry. It's not like government didn't have anything to do with the 2008 meltdown.

One of my major influences, the late Karl Hess

The Death of Politics by Karl Hess

"Libertarianism is the view that each man is the absolute owner of his life, to use and dispose of as he sees fit: that all man's social actions should be voluntary: and that respect for every other man's similar and equal ownership of life and, by extension, the property and fruits of that life is the ethical basis of a humane and open society. In this view, the only – repeat, only – function of law or government is to provide the sort of self-defense against violence that an individual, if he were powerful enough, would provide for himself."

More from the Death of Politics.

Quote for the day

"Freedom regularly makes ridiculous anyone who thinks he has figured out the limits of what is possible." - Charles Murray, What It Means To Be a Libertarian: A Personal Interpretation.

Reason asks: "Where Do Libertarians Belong?"

All three writers -- Brink Lindsey, Jonah Goldberg and Matt Kibbe -- in this symposium are cogent, refreshing and passionate about the relationship between libertarians and conservatives.All three make observations that can't be overlooked. However, I say Goldberg and Kibbe get the best of the debate.

Glaeser: The Economics of Libertarianism

Ed Glaeser confronts the paradox of libertarianism

I always find it refreshing to take a quick, clean intellectual shower in the cold, pure waters of libertarian thought, but I find myself most interested in the murky areas on the edge of libertarianism, which Professor Miron explores with aplomb. Libertarians are rarely anarchists. Almost all of them believe in some form of state power, at the very least the protection of private property and the enforcement of contracts. Many of them, including Milton Friedman, are quite comfortable with larger exercises of state power, including the redistribution of resources to those who have less. Professor Miron writes that “anti-poverty spending is the most defensible kind of redistribution,” because “the goal of this redistribution – helping the poor – is reasonable and the costs of a well-designed limited anti-poverty program (e.g., a negative income tax set on a state-by-state basis) are modest.”

But once the need for public action is accepted, things start getting very muddy and we can’t rely on either a love of liberty or fear of the state for guidance. Consider the purely hypothetical case of a massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The traditional libertarian would argue that regulation is unnecessary because the tort system will hold the driller liable for any damage. But what if the leak is so vast that the driller doesn’t have the resources to pay? The libertarian would respond that the driller should have been forced to post a bond or pay for sufficient insurance to cover any conceivable spill. Perhaps, but then the government needs to regulate the insurance contract and the resources of the insurer.

Even more problematically, the libertarian’s solution requires us to place great trust in part of the public sector: the court system. At times, judges have been bribed; any courtroom can be influenced by the best attorneys that money can buy.

Against Big Government

Wake up America.
Poll: Most Americans Want Smaller Government, Fewer Services "All hail the Libertarian Moment!"

"I'm from the government and I'm here to help you raise your kids"

Combine the Nanny State with a welfare one and you have the march of Big Government into family life. This is no mere mission creep but a preordained plan to make the world anew. The Obamacrats, to borrow a phrase, really want to warranty your life. This is the antithesis of freedom and people ought to wake up. Chuck Norris : Dirty Secret No. 1 in Obamacare - Townhall.com

Dirty secret No. 1 in Obamacare is about the government's coming into homes and usurping parental rights over child care and development.

It's outlined in sections 440 and 1904 of the House bill (Page 838), under the heading "home visitation programs for families with young children and families expecting children." The programs (provided via grants to states) would educate parents on child behavior and parenting skills.

The bill says that the government agents, "well-trained and competent staff," would "provide parents with knowledge of age-appropriate child development in cognitive, language, social, emotional, and motor domains ... modeling, consulting, and coaching on parenting practices," and "skills to interact with their child to enhance age-appropriate development."

Are you kidding me?! With whose parental principles and values? Their own? Certain experts'? From what field and theory of childhood development? As if there are one-size-fits-all parenting techniques! Do we really believe they would contextualize and personalize every form of parenting in their education, or would they merely universally indoctrinate with their own?

Are we to assume the state's mediators would understand every parent's social or religious core values on parenting? Or would they teach some secular-progressive and religiously neutered version of parental values and wisdom? And if they were to consult and coach those who expect babies, would they ever decide circumstances to be not beneficial for the children and encourage abortions?

One government rebuttal is that this program would be "voluntary." Is that right? Does that imply that this agency would just sit back passively until some parent needing parenting skills said, "I don't think I'll call my parents, priest or friends or read a plethora of books, but I'll go down to the local government offices"? To the contrary, the bill points to specific targeted groups and problems, on Page 840: The state "shall identify and prioritize serving communities that are in high need of such services, especially communities with a high proportion of low-income families."

Of course this is all very patronizing to "low income" families. They're too stupid to raise kids in the eyes of the social workers. Where's Robert Nisbet when we need him?

Hooray for Milton Friedman, the workable libertarian

It usually begins with Milton Friedman. But really it begins with Jerome Tuccille.

On the limits of libertarianism

Dr. Wheelan strikes a libertarian balance.

I've discovered just one problem with my elegant libertarian philosophy after spending two decades in public policy: It's terribly impractical for actually governing society. My whole quibble with libertarians can be boiled down to one banal question: What's the libertarian point of view on stoplights?

I like stoplights. More to the point, they're a simple and tangible example of how government can make us better off: They enable complete strangers to interact more safely and efficiently. Given a choice between the freedom to speed through an intersection at any time and the coercive red light, I'll tolerate the red light.

That's kind of silly, so consider a more significant example, like counterterrorism. In a world of libertarians, who finds Osama bin Laden?

Read the whole thing.