 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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Principles of Metanormative Justice
by Edward W. Younkins
Justice is a concept that applies only to other-directed human actions. The question of justice and injustice only arises when there are multiple individuals and some practical considerations regarding their situations and/or interactions with one another. In one sense, it is a concrete, objective, and recognizable pri... (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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Gay Marriage: Increasing the Power of the State.
by Steven Thomas Druckenmiller
A counterintuitive and iconoclastic approach to gay marriage. (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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 The Crime of Self-Defense
by Duncan Bayne
It shouldn't come as a surprise that the Government is opposed to giving New Zealanders the right to self-defense. To do so would be to admit that one has the right to keep one’s property and dispose of it in voluntary interactions; it would also involve admitting that the theft of property is equivalent to the theft of that portion of the owner’s life which went into earning it. (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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American Education: Roots of the Problem
by Robert Davison (Wolf)
Young minds are taught that firmly held convictions and clear visions of the truth are ‘worthless hallucinations of the mind,’ and that truth and fact are judgmental. Eco delivers the coup de grace with, “The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity.” (Read more...)
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A Great Day for Liberty?
by Matthew Humphreys
Throughout the last few centuries of British, and particularly English history, the House of Commons was perceived as favouring the liberty of the common man over the privileges of the aristocracy. Today in a monumental irony, it is the unelected House of Lords that is fighting for the liberty of all Britons, most recently in its steadfast opposition to a wrongheaded “anti-terrorism” bill supported by the Labour Party which dominates the Commons. (Read more...)
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Machan's Musings - Parker’s Stumble into Stereotyping
by Tibor R. Machan
I confess I was saddened by the fact that Parker allowed himself a conventional vice I most despise, business-bashing. (Read more...)
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Traffic Control and the State
by Steven Thomas Druckenmiller
How the State conditions us to follow meaningless rules everyday. (Read more...)
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Bad Philosophy Is Inconsistent
by Joseph Rowlands
Bad philosophy has a number of effects, even though it isn't practiced consistently. We don't expect it to be practiced consistently. But we've seen that when it really matters, your philosophical views become important and bad philosophy will impact your life. We've also shown that the more frequent problems come from the unseen effects of a bad philosophical view. What you miss is as important as what you mistakenly believe. (Read more...)
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"Who is Henry M. Galt?": A Review of Garet Garrett's "The Driver"
by Edward W. Younkins
Although The Driver is flawed by its sketchy characterization and its bewildering and extraneous subplot involving Galt’s family, it is still to be recommended for the portrait it paints of a hard working, visionary, passionate, loyal, and competent businessman and for the sense of the “drive of the age” that it conveys. (Read more...)
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Machan's Musings - Appreciation for A Bad Man’s Words
by Tibor R. Machan
This is something I would never have thought I’d write—words of appreciation for the last words of a vicious murderer. (Read more...)
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Machan's Musings - Welfare Statism and Evil
by Tibor R. Machan
Perhaps these people need to learn a thing or two from Professor Stone and start admitting that some people ask for their own misery, and public policy and political theory need to take this into account. (Read more...)
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Two Years, One Lesson
by Alec Mouhibian
The progressive movement sprouted from the idea that the world would really get somewhere if only everybody let their lives be run by progressives. As if a hundred years aren’t enough, each of the last two years has ended with a major international headline that has reinforced the same lesson from opposite ends. (Read more...)
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A Primer on Murray Rothbard
by Chris Matthew Sciabarra
One can disagree, and disagree strongly, with various aspects of Rothbard’s work, and still be awestruck by the sheer depth and breadth, quantity and quality, of his remarkable output as a writer and thinker. (Read more...)
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A Proto-Objectivist Argument for Lifelong Monogamy?
by Luke Setzer
In August 1988, while still involved with the Baptists and the Lutherans and before my exposure to Ayn Rand the following month, I found myself groping for -- gasp! -- objective evidence to corroborate the Judeo-Christian ethics hammered at me. This article resulted from my research into that subject. In retrospect, I can see that I already had an intuitive grasp of the concept of individual human life as the root of value. However, this argument amounts to a consequentialist viewpoint rather than a genuinely rational egoist viewpoint. I post the article here for discussion. (Read more...)
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Machan's Musings - When Elites Use Ad Hominems
by Tibor R. Machan
Being a fanatic about liberty hasn’t ever seemed to me such a dangerous thing. As when Barry Goldwater said, "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice," so neither is fanaticism in defense of it so awful. (Read more...)
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In Praise of Contempt - A Rejoinder
by Jeffrey Perren
Reply to some comments on In Praise of Contempt. (Read more...)
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Machan's Musings - Further Paradoxes of Full Equality
by Tibor R. Machan
This is a response to Professor Michael Marmot's call for further leveling of American society [Op Ed, "Life at the Top," 2/27/05]. I can only wonder whether he is familiar with George Orwell's Animal Farm and Kurt Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron," two classic literary works very intelligently skeptical about egalitarianism. Surely the worst inequality is inequality of power, and any effort to establish the kind of society Professor Marmot appears to favor would usher in just the kind of Draconian inequalities I think we all do well to try to avoid. (Read more...)
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Machan's Musings - What Happened to Political Rights?
by Tibor R. Machan
Sen advocates the spread of political rights, which at first sounds the right thing to do. Surely everyone in a country needs to have his or her right to take part in the political process protected. This is simply the extension of one’s right to liberty, the liberty to weigh in on political matters. Trouble is that by "politics" Sen and his followers around the globe, including the United Nations, have in mind any issue that concerns people. (Read more...)
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Machan's Musings - Ethics vs. Politics in Million Dollar Baby
by Tibor R. Machan
Million Dollar Baby depicts what must be understood as a sound political or legal doctrine, even if one can take issue with its morality. (Read more...)
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