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Liberty and Power

  • Feb 19, 2012

    LFS Hall of Fame Finalists Announced

    by Liberty and Power 

    The Libertarian Futurist Society has chosen four finalists for this 
year's Hall of Fame Award. The Award will be presented at the 70th World 
Science Fiction Convention, to be held in Chicago over Labor Day weekend.

The nominees are as follows:

Falling Free, a novel by Lois McMaster Bujold, first published in 1988. 
An exploration of the legal and ethical implications of human genetic 
engineering.

"'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman," by Harlan Ellison, first 
published in 1965. A satirical dystopia set in an authoritarian society 
dedicated to punctuality, where a lone absurdist rebel attempts to 
disrupt everyone else's schedules.

"The Machine Stops,” by E.M. Forster, first published in 1909. Described 
by the author as a reaction to H.G.
  • Feb 18, 2012

    Obamacare, Contraception, and Ayn Rand

    by Liberty and Power

     

    It will be little comfort to the advocates of state-mandated “free” contraception that Ayn Rand, who would have abhorred Obamacare and all its mandates, was as staunch an advocate of birth control and women’s right to abortion as one can imagine. Writing about the anti-contraception papal encyclical “Humanae Vitae,” Rand wrote in “Of Living Death” (1968):

  • Feb 14, 2012

    The Contraception Mandate

    by Liberty and Power

    So the president has put forth a "compromise" version of the H & H S decree that health insuranceproviders, including Catholic schools, hospitals, and charities to pay for all female contraceptives, (including sterilization surgery and what some people regard as abortion-inducing drugs).
     
    According to the New York Times, the compromise is an attempt to "make the new rule more like that offered by the State of Hawaii, where employees of religiously affiliated institutions obtained contraceptives through a side benefit offered by insurance companies." However, they explain somewhat helpfully: "The result differs from Hawaii in that it shifts the cost to insurers, instead of employees.
  • Feb 14, 2012

    The Contraception Mandate

    by Liberty and Power

    So the president has put forth a "compromise" version of the H & H S decree that health insuranceproviders, including Catholic schools, hospitals, and charities to pay for all female contraceptives, (including sterilization surgery and what some people regard as abortion-inducing drugs).

  • Feb 14, 2012

    The Contraception Mandate

    by Liberty and Power

    So the president has put forth a "compromise" version of the H & H S decree that health insuranceproviders, including Catholic schools, hospitals, and charities to pay for all female contraceptives, (including sterilization surgery and what some people regard as abortion-inducing drugs).

  • Feb 10, 2012

    The Fed’s Immiseration of People Who Live on Interest Earnings

    by Liberty and Power

    As I have noted previously, the Fed’s policy of acting to hold interest rates well below free-market rates in recent years has had the effect of greatly diminishing the earnings of people who rely on interest income. Such people include especially many retirees who do not wish to hold risky assets with substantial variability of earnings. In the past, many retired people have held the bulk of their wealth in the form of bank certificates of deposit, bonds, and bond-heavy mutual funds, hoping that their incomes would be secure and predictable when they were no longer working.

  • Feb 9, 2012

    “We Perpetuate War by Exalting Its Sacrifices”

    by Liberty and Power

    Rachel Maddow is using her nightly MSNBC show to agitate for a ticker-tape parade in New York City to honor the Iraq veterans and celebrate the end of the war in that country.

    What could be more ridiculous? Has she forgotten that the invasion, war, and occupation – which laid waste to Iraq, killed over a million people, unleashed sectarian violence/cleansing, and created four million refugees – was against a country that had never threatened Americans and was based on bald-faced lies about weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein’s connection to al Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks?

    What’s to celebrate? Victory? There is nothing that could be described as victory. The invasion and aggressive war guaranteed certain disgrace for the United States. But even in conventional terms, there was no victory. An authoritarian and corrupt government was left in charge -- a government that is close to Iran, which is demagogically portrayed as America’s (and Israel’s) mortal enemy. (I have no problem with the Iraq’s affinity for Iran, but America’s ruling elite can’t be thrilled about it.) The refugees have not returned to their homes. Half of them left the country. The place is a shambles.

    Again, what’s to celebrate?

  • Feb 9, 2012

    “We Perpetuate War by Exalting Its Sacrifices”

    by Liberty and Power

    Rachel Maddow is using her nightly MSNBC show to agitate for a ticker-tape parade in New York City to honor the Iraq veterans and celebrate the end of the war in that country.

    What could be more ridiculous? Has she forgotten that the invasion, war, and occupation – which laid waste to Iraq, killed over a million people, unleashed sectarian violence/cleansing, and created four million refugees – was against a country that had never threatened Americans and was based on bald-faced lies about weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein’s connection to al Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks?

    What’s to celebrate? Victory? There is nothing that could be described as victory. The invasion and aggressive war guaranteed certain disgrace for the United States. But even in conventional terms, there was no victory. An authoritarian and corrupt government was left in charge -- a government that is close to Iran, which is demagogically portrayed as America’s (and Israel’s) mortal enemy. (I have no problem with the Iraq’s affinity for Iran, but America’s ruling elite can’t be thrilled about it.) The refugees have not returned to their homes. Half of them left the country. The place is a shambles.

    Again, what’s to celebrate?

  • Feb 7, 2012

    Atlas Shrunk, Part 9: Atlas Shrugs Again; So Do I

    by Liberty and Power

    It’s been announced (timed to coincide with Rand’s birthday) that part 2 of the Atlas film trilogy is going ahead.

    Atlas Shrugged

    I wish I could be excited about this. But I found part 1 so lackluster that I haven’t even bought the dvd yet, despite having spent decades fantasising about an Atlas film. (I’ve probably missed my chance to get the now-recalled dvd box with the blurb praising “Ayn Rand’s timeless novel of courage and self-sacrifice.”) Rand is such an intensely cinematic writer, and the film over and over turns away from her cinematic choices (even in cases where constraints of time and budget would have permitted following them) in favour of something less interesting.

    Still and all, I’m mildly pleased that the project will continue.

  • Feb 4, 2012

    Iran's Nuclear Program

    by Liberty and Power

    Iran’s Nuclear Program

     
    From Gary Sick, Iran expert (“Will Israel Really Attack Iran?”):
    [The International Atomic Energy Agency has] inspectors in all the sites where Iran is producing enriched uranium. These inspectors, who make frequent surprise visits, keep cameras in place to watch every move, and they carefully measure Iran’s input of feed stock to the centrifuges and the output of low enriched uranium, which is then placed under seal.  
  • Feb 2, 2012

    The Atrocity of Hope, Part 19: Droning On

    by Liberty and Power

    Costa Concordia

    The politerati are all aflutter because GOP party hack Reince Priebus compared our President Incarnate to Francesco Schettino, the cruise ship captain who’s been charged with manslaughter in connection with the recent shipwreck off the coast of Italy.

    Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Priebus’s counterhack on the Democratic side, called it an “unbelievable comparison,” opining that “for the RNC chairman to compare the president of the United States to someone who has been charged with manslaughter shows a dramatic level of insensitivity to the families of those victims.”

    I agree. After all, Obama is guilty of actual mass murder against the civilian population of Pakistan. To compare him to someone charged with the lesser offense of manslaughter is dramatically insensitive to the families of Obama’s victims.

  • Feb 1, 2012

    Trivializing Anti-Semitism

    by Liberty and Power

     Glenn Greenwald has heroically exposed the latest trivialization of the charge of anti-Semitism. (His other posts are here and here.) These days one is likely to be hit with that ugly charge – or the perhaps uglier one of being a “self-hating Jew” – merely for doubting that Iran is developing a nuclear weapon or is an “existential threat” to Israel. (Guilty!)

    Needless to say, if the epithet “anti-Semite” is going to be used in such a patently ridiculous way, it will have little force when applied to the real thing. Why are the “Israel-firsters” so short-sighted?

    That term – “Israel-firster” – has drawn a good deal of attention from those who lightly throw around the anti-Semitism charge in order to silence criticism of Israel and the Israel lobby, but it’s not at the heart of the issue.

  • Jan 29, 2012

    The Butler Did It

    by Liberty and Power

    By Roderick

    Josiah WarrenJosiah Warren is often called the father of American individualist anarchism. (I’m in the midst of reading Crispin Sartwell’s excellent Warren collection.) Most of Warren’s major works are relatively easy to find online; an exception is his unpublished Notebook D, edited by Ann Butler for her undergraduate thesis in 1964.

  • Jan 29, 2012

    The Butler Did It

    by Liberty and Power

    By Roderick

    Josiah WarrenJosiah Warren is often called the father of American individualist anarchism. (I’m in the midst of reading Crispin Sartwell’s excellent Warren collection.) Most of Warren’s major works are relatively easy to find online; an exception is his unpublished Notebook D, edited by Ann Butler for her undergraduate thesis in 1964.