Libertarianism

Still Visible

This entry was posted in Blogging Capitalism Economics Libertarianism on by

At the top of the right side bar you will find an entry for The Invisible Adjunct under Top Referrers. The site won’t be there next time. You may remember that I mentioned a while back that she was closing up shop.
Well, it is pretty clear that she is gone but not forgotten. This article in The Chronicle of Higher Education provides an interesting profile of the real invisible adjunct and her academic world:

The mystery surrounding her identity was part of what made her blog work. In a way, she stopped being just herself, transformed instead into Every Adjunct. Knowing who she was might have broken that spell.

Read it!
Via Crooked Timber where Henry Farrell uses her story as a stepping off point to a rant about The Calvinist illusion is that luck has nothing to do with it – markets reward virtue.
Most interesting is that Henry makes this point:

Calvinists sought evidence that they were favoured by God through accumulating goods without consuming them. If you did well in worldly affairs, you could take this as a sign of God�s favour.
This may or may not be a good historical explanation. Still, it captures a set of attitudes expounded by some (although certainly not all) exponents of free markets. In many important respects, markets are political creations – they reflect differences in the bargaining power of different social groups.

Seems to me that most serious free market proponents would agree with Henry that markets today, and for the past couple hundered years, are indeed political creations. They would go one step beyond and say that this is a major problem that we should be working to eliminate.

Public Recording

This entry was posted in Capitalism Constitution Domestic Terrorism Economics Intellectual Property Law Enforcement Libertarianism on by

Max asks:

Can anyone explain by what legal authority a U.S. Marshall can order a journalist to erase a tape recording of statements made in a public place? If only someone with legal expertise had been on the scene.

Eugene Volokh considered the same event and says:

If this report is accurate, then I don’t see any legal justification for the marshal’s demand, or the marshal’s seizing the tape recorder (which therefore sounds like a Fourth Amendment violation to me). To my knowledge, there’s no law — it would presumably have to be a Mississippi law — prohibiting tape recording of public events, even ones on private property.

This practice seems to be common in other contexts. For instance, theater and concerts come immediately to mind. How is Scalia’s practice different from, for example, Bob Dylan’s?
Note, I in no way support Scalia’s practice. He is a civil servant and as such should be 100% transparent in all work and public activities.
On the other hand, I think musicians are being foolish when they prohibit recording. Of course, in many cases (not Dylan) it would take only a few concert recordings to circulate to expose the complete lack of creativity they bring to the stage.

Wasting Millions, Earning Billions

This entry was posted in Capitalism Constitution Culture Domestic Terrorism Economics Law Law Enforcement Libertarianism Regulation Taxation on by

First, via Hit & Run I learn that the american taliban bushies are not only running a ridiculous deficit but that they are also wasting millions of the dollars that they don’t have chasing down willing folks selling product to willing buyers. Come on feds, if there are assaults, rapes, fraud, extortion, etc., go after’m otherwise leave the people you are supposed to serve alone.
And, then I learn via Boing Boing that the guy who may or may not be the world’s richest man makes a portion of his billions selling furniture to the folks willingly buying product from the folks the feds are harrassing.
Ahhhh, the webs of commerce.

Nope, No Transparency Here

This entry was posted in bush Constitution Democracy Domestic Terrorism Election 2004 Federal Government Libertarianism War on Terrorism on by

The bushies will not release to the 9/11 Commission the complete text of rice’s preempted 9/11 speech. Josh Marshall tries to understand why not:

Unless the argument is that we can’t let our enemies know the depth of the poor judgment displayed by the president’s national security team it is searchingly hard to fathom what possible national security issue could be implicated by handing over the speech since it was — do we have to say it? — a speech! A speech for public consumption.

And just to be clear:

Trent Duffy, a spokesman for the White House, said only: �The White House is working with the commission to ensure that it has access to what it needs to do its job.�

These folks must have a different understanding of the commission’s job then the rest of us.