Lynne Kiesling Today has seen a flurry of information in the wake of Glenn Greenwald’s breaking the news in the Guardian last night about the National Security Agency’s (dubbed in the Washington Post the “eavesdropper in chief“) collection of Verizon phone customer metadata on a daily basis. Here’s a roundup of the resources I have …
America’s Surveillance State: Can You Hear Me Now? Read More »
Lynne Kiesling Some Friday fun listening from Nashville-based Radar vs. Wolf, a video from their debut album! [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=qOc9y0gR3Oc] Radar vs. Wolf singer/songwriter James Bratton recently wrote a post on Bleeding Heart Libertarians articulating his particular take on political philosophy, and it’s a take I find congenial. Especially this part: Why would I give them the …
Lynne Kiesling [NOTE: The following is an economist’s musings about philosophy, so if my philosopher friends can flesh out my argument and identify errors I’d be grateful. Also, this post is meant for you if you are interested in electricity regulation, so don’t just mark it as read because it’s philosophy ;-)! –LK] Although I …
Lynne Kiesling Today in Forbes Art Carden has an essay arguing that we should end the War on Drugs and make marijuana legal, now. He’s right. Here’s why. As Art argues, the War on Drugs is a policy poster child for unintended consequences, because the inelastic demand for the regulated good means that stronger enforcement …
Lynne Kiesling For the past couple of years, I’ve commemorated Martin Luther King day by rereading his Notes From A Birmingham Jail, which I recommend to you as an eloquent articulation of, among other things, the values of liberty and of equality before the law. It’s interesting to reread it this year,as our awareness of …
Lynne Kiesling Have you been paying attention to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that the Senate passed last week? I don’t blame you if you have not heard much about it, since most media have not been covering it. In addition to military expenditure authorization, it includes controversial provisions about the detention of terror …
The Defense Authorization Act and Unlawful Detention Read More »
Lynne Kiesling On a subject too important to overlook … today Steve Horwitz wrote a short, clear argument providing evidence that we are indeed living in a police state. As evidence he offers 3 related phenomena: The immoral, ineffective, and financially irresponsible security theater we endure in the form of the Transportation Security Administration (as …
Lynne Kiesling I wasn’t around KP a lot last week because I was spending a lot of time following the Patriot Act extension debacle and contacting my Congressional representatives to urge them to vote against it (of my so-called representatives, only Senator Durbin did so; I think this is the first time he and I …
Civil Liberties and Economics: More Than Just Free Markets Read More »
Lynne Kiesling I’ve been enjoying the new videos available at LearnLiberty, all of which give clear, insightful discussions of fundamental concepts of classical liberalism (including economics). My highlight of the day is Tom Bell’s “Can order be unplanned?” [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPICY2SXgn0] The answer is yes. Here Tom explores the rich intellectual history of the concept of spontaneous …
Lynne Kiesling Yesterday the Wall Street Journal featured an essay from Peruvian economist Hernando De Soto, focusing on the socio-economic roots of the current protests against the authoritarian Mubarak government. De Soto’s work on the debilitating consequences of the lack of property rights for individual prosperity and economic growth is outstanding, and he has been …
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