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One of my all time favorite movies is, “The Usual Suspects.” There is a line in the movie were Kevin Spacey says, “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was to convince the world that he didn’t exist.” I started thinking about this line after a discussion on government regulations. The state has pulled off some equally remarkable feats when it comes
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I hear people talking about a social contract all the time. Usually in the context of some authoritarian action by the government, instituted many times by the “will” of the majority (this is really a misnomer in itself, since the majority doesn’t participate in the process). I have referred to this previously as “the common good”, but the idea is really
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This is a little different than my usual blog posts. I just wanted to say, over the last month, I have officially escaped from Texas. It is good to be back at the Mountain (Albuquerque). I love this place. It has been 18 years since I have been here and I wonder why I ever left (I don't really wonder, it was a police escort). Albuquerque has always
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Sometimes I am accused of hammering this issue into the ground. That’s fine with me. It comes up a lot among the different factions of the libertarian movement and, to my mind, has become a good measure of where people stand on individual rights versus collective rights. There are a bunch of different views on why there might be a case for collective
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The War on Drugs This one has been going on for a long time. I started with this one, not because of personal preferences of any kind, but because this is the basis for so much federal intervention into the everyday lives of the citizens and it is the one I am most familiar with. The model to enact federal drug laws is still in use today and is the
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Button, Button, Who’s Got the Button Everyone has probably seen the commercials for the office supply company were all the person has to do is push the “easy” button and all their problems are solved. Every time I see that commercial I think about what Rothbard said in “Toward a Theory of Strategy of Liberty” . He is talking about the classic liberal
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Some people in the movement seem to want to hold on to the relics of the past as if their lives depend on it. I believe this is due to an inability to comprehensively come up with new approaches to age old problems. Of course, that is only a part of it. There is also the refusal to face the reality of the situation, as it is now and how it has been
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Give Peace a Chance It is funny that a word like “Peace” automatically brands you a commie loving democrat to so many people. The idea of “perpetual war” and always having an enemy to fight is so engrained on the American Right that the idea of peace is a foreign concept. The real American Idol (at least to the right-wingers), Ronald Reagan, is the
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Judicial Activism The US Supreme Court is set to hear a case involving gun bans. The interesting thing about Supreme Court cases is that one side will say they screwed up, no matter what. The court is accused by one side of abusing their power, or legislating from the bench and praised by the other side for upholding either the constitution or the spirit
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OK, this is kind of off topic for my usual posts, I admit it. But, I have noticed lots of Big Government Libertarians. That is an oxymoron, right? Well, any semi-intelligent person would think so; however it seems not to be the case lately. Because of recent (if you consider everything since Nixon recent) political trends, lots of people that would