So New Orleans is underwater, and hundreds are dead, and everyone is wringing their hands about how everything should have been handled better... Really, people, it’s time to wake up to reality. The government will never handle anything better, since it has no interest in doing so. What will the results be of this latest […]
(a response to Christopher Hitchens's artcle - http://www.canada.com/national/nationalpost/news/issuesideas/story.html?id=88b9506a-c155-4dd3-829b-bd8b43a936b2) The reality of war is so often obscured by abstractions. Let us take a closer look at Mr. Hitchens’s obfuscating language and get to the meat of the matter. War is organized murder, pure and simple, just as dictatorship is. Mr. Hitchens can proclaim that the murder […]
How did we get to where are today? How did we get to economic stagnation, the slow strangulation of liberties? How did we get to where we will be tomorrow, with economic collapse and the war of words of all against all? Here is a very rapid tour through the destruction of rationality. We start […]
I am always striving to follow the dictates of reason, and not falter from the consequences of logical premises. The path of pure reason has been a challenging, grueling, startling and joyous adventure, since it turns out that just about everything I have ever been taught – or imbibed through modern culture – is pure […]
So I read an enjoyable – but terribly predictable – book this weekend called ‘Weapons of Mass Distraction’, about how the media ‘dropped the ball’ on Iraq. Naturally, the writer was shocked and appalled, and hinted at dark conspiracies regarding the FCC, and its impending liberalization of the media marketplace. The networks were expecting to […]
So. Interesting weekend. I lazed around a good deal, and read ‘Into the Buzzsaw’, which is a fascinating look into the world of self-censoring news organizations. To every Libertarian, this is standard stuff – i.e. why do the important questions never get asked? – but it also gave me food for thought in a few […]
When you begin to realize how central the issue of freedom is to every human soul – and how much propaganda is required to obscure the simple desire of everyone to live a life free of violence – you can easily begin to see the true undercurrents of what is commonly called ‘culture’, and how […]
The last resort of the State is the realm of National Defense. Briefly put, National Defense is defined as the need for a government to protect citizens from invasion by other governments. This is an interesting paradox, even beyond the obvious one of using government to protect us from governments. If you were able to […]
It falls upon certain generations to wrestle liberty back from an ever-expanding State. It happened in England in the 17th century, America in the 18th century – now, in Canada, in the 21st century, our time has also come. For the sake of our freedoms, our futures, and our children, we must now take a […]
One of the questions I have heard asked over and over is just why intellectuals tend to be so left-wing? (A similar question is: why do people with verbal skills tend to be left-wing?) I find this question rather perplexing. Intellectuals are an utterly useless lot – as are people with merely verbal skills (usually […]
The word ‘evil’ is thrown around rather carelessly. George Bush is regularly called ‘evil’, as is Hitler of course. There seems to be little or no distinction between those who perform violence and those who counsel violence. This muddies the moral problem of good and evil – and obscures those who are actually evil. So […]
(a response to the article Humanity’s Curse in the National Post, Saturday, April 30, 2005) Well, here is another fine article pondering the mystery of Hitler. Weighty words, post-modern musings, looking for the silver lining in the very blackest cloud – all of which obscures the real point in a very dangerous way. Hitler is […]
I am reading a book at the moment called ‘Fatherless America’, which is, like most sociology texts, strong on effects and hopeless on causes. The stunning rise of fatherlessness in North America over the past 30 or so years is perhaps the most obvious symptom of escalating State power – and yet I can think […]
There is one thought that has occurred to every libertarian at one time or another: Are people just, like, stupid?It’s a fair question. The news is stuffed full of government failures. No one likes paying taxes. Everyone knows that politicians are corrupt. Everyone is sentimental about the death of this monstrous Pope – the doddering […]
So now everyone is pretending to be shocked and horrified over the Gomery inquiry. Sum total misspent: $200 million – a drop in the bucket of State spending. Not a few years ago, an HRDC scandal topped $5 billion – naturally, the 200 million is getting more attention, since the math illiterates that State schools […]
I once had a passionate argument in a coffee shop with a philosophy student who tried to convince me that the concept of ‘truth’ was entirely man-made. ‘Truth’ does not exist in the world, he said, in the same manner as a rock or a tree. ‘North’, he insisted, has not existence at all. Of […]
When I sat down to figure out what I wanted to do for my Master’s degree, one of the topics highest on my list was rescuing the reputation of the Industrial Revolution (IR). I presented this topic to my condescending (and very short-lived) thesis advisor, who patiently explained to me that the Industrial Revolution had […]
Last Saturday night (March 12, 2005, if it’s of interest), I had one of the most predictable arguments in the history of political thought. I was arguing against the welfare state, and I was told – perhaps for the millionth time – that we have to have coercive taxation because there are mean, stingy people […]
My wife is a psychotherapist, and so one of the most fascinating discussions we have (among many!) is whether the world is sick because of politics, or philosophy - or because of the family. Her belief, of course, is that everything starts with the family. Politicians are mentally sick because they were treated badly as […]
Who is the Iraq war being fought against? The answer to large and complex political questions is always very simple: follow the money. The Iraq war – like all wars – centers around a massive transfer of money from the majority to a minority. Your money – and your children’s money – is being stolen […]
The State requires two major groups to maintain power: the first are the thugs: the police, military, wardens and so on. The second, which can be more difficult to see, are the fear mongers. The fear mongers generate the terror that State power feeds on. Fear mongers are paid by the State, or protected by […]
Danny is born to a poor family. A poor mother, to be exact. His father has vanished, secure in the knowledge that his children will be taken care of by State welfare payments. His mother, faced with a life of low-paying jobs, prefers getting pregnant for a living. Danny goes to a government school, where […]
Challenging the State is an extremely dangerous business – not just for individuals, but for society as a whole. There is great danger in losing such a confrontation – but great danger in winning as well. Toppling those who rule the State does not destroy the power of the State, no more than removing a […]
A few days ago, I was at lunch with a colleague, an ex-military man, and the talk got to politics. I mentioned that the government was never going to voluntarily shrink in size; it would only collapse in on itself through bankruptcy. He said that he had a lot of respect for Paul Martin, Canada’s […]
When I was a teenager, and I was exposed to ideas as a simple as ‘taxation is theft’, I swallowed them as easily as a cold beer on a hot day. I devoured the whole world of rationality, objectivism, libertarianism and Austrian economics. I loved the whole system of logical analysis, because it made sense […]
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