 |
 |
|
|
|
||
As I mention below, Ralph Nader is not altogether wrong about what the doctrine of corporate personhood has led to. As Felix Morley explains, abuse of the Fourteenth Amendment to nationalize rights, for corporations as well as individuals, enabled the federal government to extend its powers tremendously, first in the name of laissez faire and [...]
Filed under: Liberty, Philosophy, Politics
The tail end of last week was a busy time for TAC staff. Thursday, which was also the first day of CPAC, was our print date. I made it to the conclave just long enough to emcee Thomas DiLorenzo’s talk, “Lincoln on Liberty: Friend or Foe?”, before hotfooting it back to the office for a [...]
Filed under: Ideology, Philosophy, The Left, War
There’s an irony worth pointing out in the story of the “Net Book Agreement,” which sounds like it ought to be something dealing with e-books but was actually a pact between British publishers and booksellers agreed to in 1899. The NBA specified that shops should sell books for prices set by the publishers; any discounting [...]
Filed under: Books, Ideology, Philosophy
Long-time readers of the Tory Anarchist will remember this post from two years back in which I called attention to a colorful anecdote involving Ludwig von Mises and Ayn Rand in William F. Buckley Jr.’s memoir of the Goldwater era, Flying High. It sounded almost too scripted to be true, and a reader wondered whether [...]
The best analysis I’ve seen of the clash between Macmillan and Amazon over setting the prices for e-books comes from Paul Carr at TechCrunch. He provides some necessary publishing-industry background: In the UK, way back in 1900, publishers corralled retailers into the Net Book Agreement (NBA); an agreement between British publishers and booksellers that books [...]
The great Thomist scholar and author of the Father Dowling books died Jan. 29. His passing has been little noted in the American press, but the Scotstman has an excellent obituary here.
Filed under: the dead
The TAC website was hacked to death the night before Apple’s iPad launched, so my initial reactions to the shiny new gadget went out via Twitter rather than this blog. I wasn’t too impressed — like a lot of critics, I concluded it was an oversized iPod Touch, which is already a product in search [...]
Filed under: Technology
Susan McWilliams’s TAC essay on Robert Nisbet effectively conveys the emphasis he places on intermediary institutions as the basis for his conservative thought. But not all conservatives have seen their philosophy as deriving from this source. Consider, for example, Thomas Molnar’s “The Liberal Hegemony: The Rise of Civil Society,” which, as the title suggests, presents [...]
Filed under: Philosophy, Politics