 Machan's Musings - Words and Pictures Don’t Justify Violent Response
by Tibor R. Machan
Whatever has happened to that simple but true notion that sticks and stones may break your bones, but words—and pictures—will never hurt? (Read more...)
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Machan's Musings - To Besmirch or to Praise, That's the Question
by Tibor R. Machan
Are people more likely to do well or badly? (Read more...)
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Machan's Musings - Big Bang or Steady State?
by Tibor R. Machan
During the early 20th century the view that the universe had existed forever, the so called “Steady State” view, was still in contention but around the middle of the century the evidence began to mount in favor of what has come to be known as the Big Bang. (Read more...)
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Machan's Musings - Being Politically Incorrect Before Its Time
by Tibor R. Machan
I was doing politically incorrect things back then when the term had not yet been introduced into the language. (Read more...)
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Machan's Musings - Roosevelt's Phony Rights
by Tibor R. Machan
April 12 was the anniversary of FDR’s inglorious death, from ailments largely hidden from the public in a pattern of deception that has now become all too closely associated with America’s political leadership. But that’s nothing compared to the deception perpetrated upon the American people via Roosevelt’s list of phony rights, a list that forever corrupted the ideas of the American Founders. (Read more...)
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Machan's Musings - Why American Politics Has Gone Nuts
by Tibor R. Machan
The party politics we have is not about fielding candidates for a specific job but about whether America will have this or that kind of government - big, small, democratic, welfare statist, liberal, conservative or whatever. (Read more...)
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Machan's Musings - Being Among The Few Who Are Right
by Tibor R. Machan
The idea that each person is, by virtue of the very nature of his or her humanity, a sovereign being, a self-ruler not to be ruled against his or her will by anyone else is not only true but also the most radical idea in all of political history. So why expect that it would be all that popular anyway? It takes time for such a novel, outrageous idea to catch on, if it ever fully will. (Read more...)
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Machan's Musings - Puzzles of Intelligent Design
by Tibor R. Machan
First, the design of the world isn’t actually all that intelligent, considering how many matters seem to go awry all the time, especially with us. Second, and more importantly, intelligence is produced by a living brain, so the idea that there had been intelligence prior to the world defies what we know pretty well—a brain requires the world for it to exist. (Read more...)
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Machan's Musings - Bill Gates Didn’t Go Far Enough
by Tibor R. Machan
"American high schools are obsolete. By obsolete, I don't just mean that our high schools are broken, flawed and underfunded.... By obsolete, I mean that our high schools—even when they are working exactly as designed—cannot teach our kids what they need to know today." (Read more...)
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Machan's Musings - Columns for Mind Teasing
by Tibor R. Machan
A few things I do know, about why I write columns, involve certain goals. Among these, foremost is the achievement of a world in which freedom is in greater rather than lesser abundance, the freedom of the individual from coercive intervention in his or her life. But why bother about this, one might ask? (Read more...)
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Machan's Musings - Coercive Zeal Gone Wild
by Tibor R. Machan
Today, thinking it's the Right that's a threat to civil liberties is clearly wrong, what with political correctness guiding universities and other institutions in their hiring and promotion policies. (Read more...)
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Machan's Musings - Death & Dying
by Tibor R. Machan
Fretting about one’s death is pretty useless and is merely going to contribute to making one’s life more unhappy than it has to be. (Read more...)
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Machan's Musings: The Right to Be Dumb - or Peculiar
by Tibor R. Machan
It’s one thing to urge people not to be dumb or carry on indulging themselves unwisely, imprudently. It’s entirely another to coerce them to act as you would want them to act. (Read more...)
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Machan's Musings - Misunderstanding Private Property Rights
by Tibor R. Machan
Attacking private property rights comes not so much to making sure that people don’t just care for themselves but to making sure that they don’t get to choose what the goals are that gain support, including goals having little to do with themselves. In other words, attacking private property rights amounts to attacking the right of individuals to choose, to decide what kind of goals they support and how much support they receive. (Read more...)
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Machan's Musings - A Basic Legal Debate Nearly Grasped
by Tibor R. Machan
We live in a largely anti-philosophical age and without philosophy the nature of law is impossible to grasp. Rosen and Co., especially the major critic of the Constitution in Exile movement he cites, Professor Cass Sunstein of the University of Chicago School of Law, unfortunately wish to have a grasp without the grounding this requires. (Read more...)
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 Machan's Musings - A Vision, Partly Fulfilled
by Tibor R. Machan
I am sure glad I took part in an event that exhibited and illustrated that there really is no inherent basis for a racial divide, none at all, not as people are in their natural, unconstrained ways. (Read more...)
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Machan's Musings - Creeping Censorship
by Tibor R. Machan
This is really scary. And there isn’t even any allusion to terrorism here, so the folks pushing for this censorship are evidently very confident that they have worn us all down in our resistance to the creeping expansion of government power. (Read more...)
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Machan's Musings - Why Freedom Doesn’t Sell Well
by Tibor R. Machan
There simply are too many people who want to take shortcuts, refuse to take responsibility for their own conduct and believe they can get away with this—and sadly often do—by calling upon the government to force others to shoulder burdens they ought to assume. (Read more...)
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Machan's Musings - Dissing Liberating Technology
by Tibor R. Machan
I say to technological innovation, bring it all on! We will do fine sorting out the good and bad uses of it without the churlishness of the likes of the people Newsweek chose to report on or Christine Rosen’s nay-saying. Just because the manners and mores of olden times may become somewhat moot, it doesn’t follow that new manners and mores of merit will not be forthcoming. (Read more...)
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Machan's Musings - America Bashing Continues
by Tibor R. Machan
Whenever you encounter critics of the American system, please look out: If it is being put down for upholding the principles of individual rights, the critics are actually being anti-American in the important sense of that term, namely, turning against America’s central ideal. When the critic employs the standard of liberty, then he or she is urging America to be more like what it should be in the first place. (Read more...)
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Machan's Musings - So I Was Robbed
by Tibor R. Machan
I am writing all of this in part so as to fix the matter in my own mind, good and hard, not to continue with my own complacency. Sure, I had an alarm, sure it was broad daylight, and sure in was in the middle of a mostly civilized city on a sunny weekend day. But not only is it common sense to take extra measures in any big city but I had personally been put on alert. Yet I chose to be out to lunch, something I detest when I let myself do it. (Read more...)
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Machan's Musings - Terri Schiavo’s Sad Saga
by Tibor R. Machan
However much even millions may desire that Terri Schiavo be provided with more time, so that some miracle might make her recover, it should not occur at the expense of the lives and liberties of people who haven’t volunteered for this task. (Read more...)
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Machan's Musings - Religion and Economics
by Tibor R. Machan
There are other places to look for the case for liberty than one that poses all the conundrums of theology and religion. (Read more...)
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Machan's Musings - The Forgotten Ninth Amendment
by Tibor R. Machan
Against Scalia it can be argued that although the idea of a living constitution is dangerous, so is the idea of a frozen one. Reasonable development in the meaning of the terms in the fundamental laws of the society is to be expected and should not be thwarted in the US Supreme Court’s deliberations and rulings. (Read more...)
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Machan's Musings - Coerced Altruism’s Ruinous Popularity
by Tibor R. Machan
You might say I wrote the book on generosity—one of mine had this as its topic and its title, as well, back in 1998. So when in response to a recent column, in which I reaffirmed the propriety of freely chosen as against coerced generosity, I received dozens of really nasty letters, claiming that I was advocating cruelty and meanness, I had to shake my head in dismay. (Read more...)
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