Posted on March 16th, 2009 by John Schwenkler
First, from Paul Weyrich and William Lind’s forthcoming and decidedly un-libertarian The Next Conservatism, which I’m currently reviewing for ISI’s Intercollegiate Review: Local order depends on local police. The job of local police is not responding to crime, but prevent crime before it happens. Response comes too late; civic order has already been disrupted. Here [...]
Filed under: civil liberties, conservatism, government/law, libertarianism, politics
Posted on March 4th, 2009 by John Schwenkler
There are few things in the world that can take a hatchet to blogger’s block like a provocation from Russell Arben Fox: … the last time John Schwenkler […] and I went back and forth over this whole idea of whether or not Red Tories and Christian socialists and left conservatives generally (all eight of [...]
Filed under: conservatism, libertarianism, politics
Posted on February 18th, 2009 by John Schwenkler
Will sticks up for it, and good for him: I deserve to stand accused as often as anyone else, but it’s a largely contentless epithet that serves to do little more than generate bad feelings. And at the end of the day everyone (well, almost everyone) is a statist, and the focus of our disputes [...]
Filed under: government/law, libertarianism, war
Posted on February 5th, 2009 by John Schwenkler
… hyperinflation, stagnation, dollar devaluation, earmarks, excessive debt, bankruptcy, loss of jobs, growth of welfare state, expansion of nanny state, unrealized expectations, economic impotence, depression, halitosis, and sweaty palms. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEDIyztZGBA]
Filed under: economics, government/law, libertarianism
Posted on January 28th, 2009 by John Schwenkler
Via Eve at the Sisterblog, I see that Walter Olson, whose work on the product safety debacle I linked the other day, on has declared that today is CPSIA Blogging Day. Unfortunately I didn’t get notice in time to pull something more substantial together, but let this be my contribution (emphases mine): WASHINGTON, D.C. – [...]
Filed under: government/law, libertarianism
Posted on January 22nd, 2009 by John Schwenkler
Like Ross and Will Wilkinson, I think there’s a ton to be said for Edward Glaeser’s case for “small-government egalitarianism”, which would be worth reading in its entirety even if the only thing you took away from it was this quotation from Woodrow Wilson: “If the government is to tell big business men how to [...]
Filed under: economics, government/law, libertarianism, taxation, urbanism
Posted on January 22nd, 2009 by John Schwenkler
Radley Balko tallies up President Obama’s first orders of business, and pronounces himself a happy libertarian: Yes, it’s only been one day. But this is mighty impressive. Obama’s top priority upon taking office was to sign orders rolling back his predecessor’s expansion of executive power. Put another way, Obama’s top priority upon taking office was [...]
Filed under: civil liberties, government/law, libertarianism
Posted on January 21st, 2009 by John Schwenkler
He says some things we’ve all thought from time to time: Any advice about food? I’ll tell you. Alice Waters annoys the living shit out of me. We’re all in the middle of a recession, like we’re all going to start buying expensive organic food and running to the green market. There’s something very Khmer [...]
Filed under: food, libertarianism, politics
Posted on January 17th, 2009 by John Schwenkler
The craptastic mess of legislative overreach that is the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act really is the libertarian blogger’s gift that keeps on giving. Rod and James noted a while back that the situation Mark Thompson had described in the children’s toy industry was going to affect the sale of secondhand clothing, too, by forcing [...]
Filed under: government/law, libertarianism
Posted on December 30th, 2008 by John Schwenkler
by Mark Thompson Just as a final follow-up to today’s post-mortems on the Bush Administration and the last 8 years of conservatism, it’s worth asking the question of how the less-dogmatic elements of the once-great Republican Coalition can gain control of the party and restore the fundamentally good-natured tone of the Reagan era, and, in [...]
Filed under: conservatism, libertarianism, personal, politics
