A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

Libertarianism

  • Friday Links

    –A challenge to libertarians on the coecivene power of private entities. –A.O. Scott on superhero movies as a Ponzi scheme. –Richard Beck of Experimental Theology on why he blogs. –A political typology quiz from the Pew Research Center. (I scored as a “solid libera.l” Although I’d take issue with the way some of the choices Read more

  • Friday Links

    –Iowa’s House approved a bill to make it illegal to film the goings on in factory farms; it still has to pass the Senate. –The great Midwestern backlash. –What is the difference between liberals and libertarians? –Rejecting death-centered Christianity. –The fondness some secular liberals have for fundamentalism. –More than half of Americans now favor legal Read more

  • Whither the liberal-libertarian alliance?

    Here’s an interesting post from the new(ish) blog Bleeding-Heart Libertarians: Here are some policy areas where classical liberals or libertarians seem to have a lot of common ground with those on the political left: • Immigration – Immigration is a net benefit to the receiving country and a matter of justice to would-be migrants. We Read more

  • Some links for the weekend

    – Peter Singer on balancing concern for the environment with efforts to lift people out of poverty. – Kevin Drum on the difference between liberals and libertarians. – Bob Herbert on Sargent Shriver: “one of America’s great good men.” – Peter Berger’s blog at The American Interest. (Here’s a piece on recent developments in American Read more

  • Social justice and Christianity are inseparable

    I’ve honestly not paid much attention to Glenn Beck–I’ve never even seen a clip of his show, and most of what I know about him comes from blogs and other media reports. This past weekend’s “Beckfest” on the Mall, though, significantly raised his profile. It’s even being suggested that he’s now the head of a Read more

  • Varieties of liberalism

    This post (via Crooked Timber) is about British politics, but it nicely lays out the distinction between “economic liberalism” and “social liberalism,” or what we in the U.S. would call “market liberalism” (or libertarianism) and egalitarian or left-liberalism. For economic (or market) liberals, there is at times a clear sense that the free market produces Read more

  • Property and justice

    My earlier post wasn’t intended to be a comprehensive critique of libertarianism, but one interesting issue that came up in the comment thread was the justice of initial property acquisition. Libertarianism, at least in its natural-rights form, says that holdings in property are just if they are the result of just initial acquisition and voluntary Read more

  • Rights, liberties, and taxation

    A point that I’ve tried to make before, but which may bear repeating since it’s Tax Day: the distinction between “positive” and “negative” rights, or liberty, is largely illusory–or at least not that important. Libertarians sometimes use this distinction to differentiate their position from “welfare” liberals. In the libertarian utopia, rights are guarantees against interference Read more

  • The end of the affair

    The flirtation between liberals and libertarians that arose out of shared anti-Bush animus is over, according to Ed Kilgore. The causes are an economically interventionist Democratic administration and the rightward pull exerted on libertarians by Tea Partyism. Not to mention, this Jonathan Chait piece that Kilgore links to seems like the definitive refutation of “liberaltarianism” Read more

  • “I hate the government” is not a coherent ideology

    I’m not a libertarian, but libertarians do have some decent ideas, and if they followed the advice in this article they might have a better shot at implementing some of them. Read more