As I said yesterday, the Kentucky Senate race between Rand Paul and Jack Conway should be a real battle. Paul is probably not helping himself by insisting, as many libertarian ideologues but few Senate hopefuls do, that the 1964 Civil Rights Act was wrong to ban racial discrimination in private establishments like restaurants and movie theaters. INTERVIEWER: Would you have ... Read More
In response to the South Park / Muhammad controversy, several bloggers with a libertarian bent have been pushing the idea of a “Draw Muhammad!” contest to retaliate against the New York-based Islamic extremist group Revolution Muslim. The idea originated with noted sex columnist Dan Savage, who has advertised it as a way to retaliate against Revolution Muslim’s “veiled threats” and “water down ... Read More
The tea-party movement has always contained potentially contradictory strains of populism and libertarianism. Back when we were bailing out the big banks, these strands coincided: conservatives could say, look, Obama is giving your money away to Wall Street fat cats and he’s interfering in the free market. But now that Obama is proposing to recoup the bailouts with a tax ... Read More
The U.S. Supreme Court may be about to render the most important business decision of the decidedly pro-business Roberts era, but one might not know it from the details of the case. The plaintiff is a small conservative advocacy group, not a major corporation; the focal point is a corporate-funded anti-Hillary Clinton documentary that was banned by the FEC, as ... Read More
Public discourse in the age of the Internet Republic.com 2.0 by Cass Sunstein Princeton University Press, September 2009, $24.95, 272 pp. Create Your Own Economy by Tyler Cowen Dutton Adult, July 2009, $25.95, 272 pp. Cass Sunstein begins Republic.com 2.0 by asking his readers to imagine a world where their control over the media they consume is total.”It is some ... Read More
For an allegedly “grotesque” (but, thankfully, “innocuous”) confusion, Sam Barr’s equation of liberty and equally is pretty well-founded empirically. Think about the history of America. Think about the struggle to integrate non-land-owners, Catholics, Jews, women, blacks and now gays. Surely, as Sam notes, all this expanded both liberty and equality at once. One way to understand the relationship between liberty ... Read More
I know that Daniel is only trying to soften his blows, but really, I don’t think my argument can be “innocuous” and “unfortunate” at the same time. Come on, tell me what you really think! I can appreciate how it seems that liberals are always in the business of telling people what rights they do and don’t have. But, in ... Read More
Danny B, who thankfully is the first person ever to accuse me of “grotesque confusion” (in those exact terms at least), takes the true libertarian line on gay marriage. Yet the degree to which he grants some pretty questionable conservative assumptions surprises me. I’m not sure exactly what Daniel means by “civil society,” but surely he realizes that the government ... Read More
Marriage isn’t really one of my issues, and as HPR’s libertarian-in-residence (though I’d proudly call myself an American reactionary) the entire gay marriage debacle is not one of my priorities. There are a couple things I’d like to point out in response to the post below, first being the grotesque confusion of liberty and equality that occurs in calling the ... Read More
Chris, I fear, has read too much into my use of the word “reactionary.” I meant only to suggest that Republicans have gone with libertarianism over, say, Huckabee-ism or Olympia Snowe-ism, because they are reacting to Obama’s ambitious economic progressivism. This is exactly what we would expect from a minority party: the majority gets to lay out its agenda first, ... Read More
Nate Silver notices that, of the various oppositional poses that Republicans had to choose from, they have seemed exclusively to pursue the libertarian one. They embraced the tea-party movement, which originated in libertarian circles; they proposed an alternative budget notable for its fantastical belief that you can cut taxes and balance the budget at the same time; they seem generally ... Read More
Rewriting the history of the Civil War
Will Wilkinson rightly diagnoses the Republican Party’s brain drain: smart people don’t want to hang around with “flag-waving moral reactionaries” no matter how much they all might agree on the godlike efficiency of the market. But he still does believe in the market, so he can’t, or hasn’t, given himself up to the Democrats just yet: “So I think my ... Read More
