Month: January 2008

Anarchistic Whining

The very late Murray Rothbard didn’t want to be called an “anarchist” because the word has acquired several negative connotations. It is clear, however, that Rothbard was an anarchist; he just didn’t want to be called one.

Robert Higgs reifies government:

The beginning of political wisdom is the realization that despite everything you’ve always been taught, the government is not really on your side; indeed, it is out to get you.

On top of that, he counsels an ostrich-like foreign policy:

[D]espite everything that is claimed for the military’s protective powers, its operation and deployment overseas leave us ordinary Americans facing greater, not lesser, risk than we would otherwise face, because of the many enemies it cultivates who would have left us alone, if the U.S. military had only left them alone. (Yes, Virginia, they are over here because we’re over there.)

I guess Higgs wouldn’t care if the Middle East and its vast reserves of oil were to fall into the hands of Islamofascists.

Anyway, Higgs asserts that

[a]lthough the mugger, the sneak thief, and the con man are not the only types of government operatives, they make up a large proportion of the leading figures in government today. The lower ranks, especially in the various police agencies, have a disproportionate share of the bullies.

I’d like to see his data. Certainly a goodly share of cops are bullies, and a goodly share of government “operatives” behave like bullies, muggers, sneak thieves, and con men (Higgs’s characterizations). But the way Higgs puts it, it’s as if government was invented to serve those types, which is rather unfair to Mr. Madison et al.

Here’s a better way of putting it: Government, when allowed to assume functions beyond the minimal ones alloted by the Constitution, becomes a haven for some bullies, muggers, sneak thieves, and con men. But most of them, I daresay, are not in government.

Related posts:
“But Wouldn’t Warlords Take Over?” (24 Jul 2005)
“Liberty As a Social Compact” (28 Feb 2006)
“The Source of Rights” (06 Sep 2006)
“The Golden Rule, for Libertarians” (02 Aug 2007)
“Anarchistic Balderdash” (17 Aug 2007)
“The Fear of Consequentialism” (26 Nov 2007)
“Optimality, Liberty, and the Golden Rule” (18 Dec 2007)

You Know…

…that the debate about global warming has become more balanced when a website affiliated with CNN picks up a story from IBD. Here’s some of it:

Climate Change: Skepticism about man-induced global warming has reached the science pages of the newspaper of record. This suggests the debate not only isn’t over, but that it’s also finally newsworthy….

In his first [NYT] column of the new year, [John] Tierney writes that the deniers of truth are in fact Nobel Laureate Al Gore and those who ignore both scientific evidence and the historical record in their prophecies of doom. 2008, says Tierney, will be no exception….

A case in point cited by Tierney was when Arctic sea ice last year hit the lowest level ever recorded by satellites. It was hardly a blip in Earth’s geological history, but Tierney noted how “it was big news and heralded as a sign that the whole planet was warming.”

Less dramatic and newsworthy was the announcement that the same satellites also recorded that the Antarctic sea ice had reached the highest level ever….

In the same week Gore received his Nobel Peace Prize, the respected scientific journal Nature published a paper you probably didn’t hear much about. It concluded that global warming had a minimal effect on hurricanes….

As for temperature, Tierney reports how British meteorologists made headlines predicting that the buildup of greenhouse gases would make 2007 the hottest year on record. After 2007 was actually lower than any year since 2001, the BBC still proclaimed: “2007 Data Confirms Warming Trend.”…

But for greenies, it doesn’t matter what the weather actually is or what the data actually show. It’s all caused by global warming. As Canadian Greenpeace rep Steven Guilbeault explained in 2005: “Global warming can mean colder; it can mean drier; it can mean wetter; that’s what we’re dealing with.” Oh.

We hope Tierney’s piece signals the beginning of a fair and balanced debate on the Earth’s climate and man’s impact on it in the mainstream media, including all the inconvenient truths that are fit to print.

Posts at Liberty Corner:
“‘Warmism’: The Myth of Anthropogenic Global Warming” (23 Aug 2007)
“Re: Climate ‘Science’” (19 Sep 2007)
“More Evidence against Anthropogenic Global Warming” (25 Sep 2007)
“Yet More Evidence against Anthropogenic Global Warming” (04 Oct 2007)
“Global Warming, Close to Home” (22 Dec 2007)

Plus, many more in this category.