>Individualist and state-hater against illegals?

>(REPOST FROM Tuesday, June 20, 2006) Stephen Kinsella over at the Mises blog complains of the open letter to president Bush sponsored by the Independent Institute (in Oakland), signed by well over 500 economists and a few all around notable scholars, in defense of immigration. Kinsella’s critique is that 1) the letter doesn’t seem to […]

>Free e-book: "The Conservative Nanny State"

>(REPOST FROM Monday, June 05, 2006) There’s a new book online called The Conservative Nanny State, authored by Dean Baker. I highly recommend it, as it states what true libertarians – as opposed to vulgar libertarians (a phrase coined by Kevin Carson) – have been saying all along: that the regulatory/welfare state is not anathema […]

>State Property is NOT Public Property

>(REPOST FROM Friday, May 05, 2006) There is a very important distinction. State Property is indeed PRIVATE Property: the private property of the state. But is not the state the representative of the public in a democracy? No, not at all. First of all, assuming even a majority of the populace votes, the remaining members […]

>Islamic counter-feminist feminism?

>(REPOST FROM Friday, April 28, 2006) Elizabeth Warnock Fernea’s book “In Search of Islamic Feminism: One Woman’s Global Journey”, is an interesting read. The book’s chapters each focus on the state of Islamic women’s movements in a given middle eastern country. (No chapter on Indonesia incidentally, home of the world’s largest Muslim population.) The book […]

>Even Condoleeza Rice doesn’t deserve this

>(REPOST FROM Monday, April 17, 2006) So a math instructor at Bellevue Community College in Washington state decided upon a rather controversial word problem on a recent math test. It reads: Condoleezza holds a watermelon just over the edge of the roof of the 300 -foot Federal Building, and tosses it up with a velocity […]

>A defense of the Hindu caste system?

>(REPOST FROM Monday, April 10, 2006) Alain Danielou has written a book called “India: A Civilization of Differences: The Ancient Tradition of Universal Tolerance”. In his book he makes the controversial claim that the Hindu caste system is a defensible form of social organization. Rather than being a coercive institution that forcibly segregates people, it […]

>Oh State Socialism, what hath thou wrought?

>(REPOST FROM Thursday, April 06, 2006) The Dutch Labour Party, and its deputy chairperson Sharon Dijksma, have a great idea. They want to penalize educated mothers who choose not to work (http://www.expatica.com/source/site_article.asp?subchannel_id=1&story_id=28628&name=Penalise%20educated%20stay-at-home%20women%20-%20PvdA). Their reasoning goes something like this: The state (often confused with “society”) pays to educate these women, so the refusal on the womens’ […]

>Ernest Renan on Nationalism

>(REPOST FROM Monday, March 27, 2006) This quote from Robert Higgs’ article at Liberty magazine(http://libertyunbound.com/archive/2006_04/higgs-war.html):“French philosopher Ernest Renan aptly characterized a nation as ‘a group of people united by a mistaken view about the past and a hatred of their neighbors.’” I think his idea that nations comprise people that have a “mistaken view about […]

>Harvey Mansfield vs. Naomi Wolf

>(REPOST FROM Wednesday, March 22, 2006) On Book TV this last weekend, Naomi Wolf and Harvey Mansfield faced off over his new book “Manliness”. And boy did she ever rip him a new one. Mansfield wavered and equivocated throughout the interview, clearly made nervous by Wolf’s capable onslaught. On the one hand he would make […]

>"Books not Bombs" isn’t the half of it

>(REPOST FROM Tuesday, March 14, 2006) A pretty interesting write-up on the UN-schooling movement appears in the Jewish World Review (http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0306/unschooling.php3). This goes beyond homeschooling – an alternative educational system that is even rarer than private schools and thought to be about as radical as it gets. UN-schooling does one even better (or worse depending […]