Libertarianism


Policy Soup

Steve at Begging to Differ rolls out a pretty important idea:

He’s right, but then, sometimes regulatory chaos is a good thing. State-level law is a primordial policy soup, subject to the Darwinian pressures of elections and lawsuits. Good ideas adapt and propagate. Bad ones wither and die. It’s messy. It’s chaotic. It’s perplexing and unwieldy, but it’s a glorious disaster. It’s democracy. And it works.

I’m not going to bite on the It’s democracy bit but it can work and is a good reason to subject most, if not all federal law, to some slash and burn activity.

For that matter the largest geopolitical level this chaos should operate at is probably a city or county level.


The Dancer and the Dance

Arthur Silber is back again. Both at Once Upon a Time…

I offer these stories not to condemn the genuinely great and revolutionary achievements of the West, or to challenge the profound, inestimable worth of what we generally refer to as “Enlightenment values.” I offer them to make a more modest suggestion: that the fundamental approach inculcated in all of us by our cultural traditions of thousands of years does not represent the only way of viewing the universe and our place in it.

And at a new site called The Sacred Moment where he has aleady reposted his important series On Torture.

Make Arthur a regular read!


How Soon In The States?

Are these guys practicing for their return home?

American troops in Baghdad yesterday blasted their way into the home of an Iraqi journalist working for the Guardian and Channel 4, firing bullets into the bedroom where he was sleeping with his wife and children.

Ali Fadhil, who two months ago won the Foreign Press Association young journalist of the year award, was hooded and taken for questioning. He was released hours later.

Dr Fadhil is working with Guardian Films on an investigation for Channel 4’s Dispatches programme into claims that tens of millions of dollars worth of Iraqi funds held by the Americans and British have been misused or misappropriated.

Jeanne says:

If that isn’t an attempt to intimidate a journalist asking dangerous questions, I can’t imagine what it is. But American journalists ought to demand some answers.

Yes, definitely intimidation.  And,yes, American journalists ought to demand some answers but will they be intimidated? Will they, especially if based in Iraq, be willing to ask dangerous questions?