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The moral claim for intellectual property – that an inventor has the exclusive right to the application of a certain idea in the form of a monopoly granted by the state – has long been on shaky ground. Reductio ad absurdum, where would the monopoly stop? When the inventor dies? 70 years afterward, as current [...]
Filed under: Decentralism, Economics, Ideas, Law, liberties, Technology
The PC police are at it again. According to a sympathetic Associated Press report on November 7 and a survey conducted by the American Association of University Women, “sexual harassment is pervasive in grades 7-12.” Such improprieties are taking place “in person or electronically via texting, email and social media,” and those issuing and summarizing [...]
Most Americans seem to inured to the fact the government — in concert with the corporate sector — has found a zillion ways to pillage their privacy over the last decade using an ever-evolving range of technology: police who stop you on the side of the road can now extract everything from your cell phone [...]
I was extremely pleased to see my take on the original Occupy Wall Street protest posted online yesterday, but I feel it may already be largely outdated. I wrote the piece in early October as an attempt to understand what the movement was all about. Although I never fully agreed with what most protesters were [...]
My parents own two flower shops in my hometown, and as I was growing up I worked there after school and every summer. One day when I was 17, I had to deliver an arrangement to a nursing home just west of town. I viscerally disliked nursing home deliveries, but upon entering, I was relieved [...]
Jacob Sullum’s invaluable feature story in the latest issue of Reason details the many ways that President Obama has failed to live up to the high hopes drug law reformers pinned on him back in 2008, when hope was still fashionable. I found this part particularly stomach-turning: More generally, Obama has repeatedly expressed the view that many people in [...]
I share Dan’s revulsion at crowd’s ghoulish reaction to Rick Perry’s record of executions at Wednesday’s debate, but what I find most interesting is the way Perry elided Williams’ question: WILLIAMS: Have you struggled to sleep at night with the idea that any one of those might have been innocent? PERRY: No, sir. I’ve never struggled with [...]
For any of you who haven’t been keeping track of all the craziest scandals in Washington–not the kind where Congressmen send crotch pics or dress up like furries, but the kind where people get killed–the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) ran a program from November 2009 to to January 2011 known as Fast and [...]
Filed under: Crime, Foreign policy, Immigration, Law, Scandal
An unprecedented police presence of 16,000 officers in London last Wednesday night, with many more stationed throughout England, has manged to quell the most extensive and vicious rioting in the UK in living memory. The violence may have hatched itself from a protest on the previous Saturday over the police shooting of 29-year-old Mark Duggan [...]
Back in March, I sat down with my friend and Independent Institute Research Editor Anthony Gregory to discuss Barack Obama’s foreign policy, the renegades of American history, and his research on the origins of habeas corpus, and you can download or listen to that conversation here. This is the first podcast that I produced every aspect of, [...]
Filed under: Culture, Decentralism, Foreign policy, History, Ideas, Law, libertarianism, liberties, War