The Critical Dilemma Facing Pro-War Libertarians by Jacob G. Hornberger February 14, 2007 Also see: The Pentagon's Power to Arrest, Torture, and Execute Americans It Can't Happen Here The Islamo-Fascist Rationale for Abandoning Liberty The 9/11 attacks exposed a major fault line in the libertarian movement. On one side of the divide were those libertarians who contended that the 9/11 attacks were a direct consequence of U.S. foreign policy specifically the bad things that ...
Lies and Leviathan by James Bovard August 1, 2006 Big government requires big lies and not just on wars but across the board. The more powerful government becomes, the more abuses it commits and the more lies it must tell. Interventions beget debacles that require cover-ups and denials. The more the government screws up, the more evidence the government is obliged to bury or deny. The government becomes ...
Lucretia Coffin Mott (1793–1880) by Wendy McElroy August 1, 2006 In 1853, Lucretia Mott described the Quaker women of the Massachusetts community into which she had been born. “Look at the heads of those women; they can mingle with men; they are not triflers; they have intelligent subjects of conversation.” Quakers believed that all people were equal before God and, so, every human being’s autonomy deserved equal respect. They ...
Piercing through Myths, Lies, and Stupidity by George Leef August 1, 2006 Myths, Lies, and Downright Stupidity by John Stossel (Hyperion 2006); 304 pages; $24.95. John Stossel, anchor of the ABC News program 20/20, is a rarity among the ranks of American media personalities. He’s a skeptic when it comes to everything except freedom. He even calls himself a libertarian. Over the years, ...
Libertarian Class Analysis by Sheldon Richman June 1, 2006 Say the words “class analysis” or “class conflict” and most people will think of Karl Marx. The idea that there are irreconcilable classes, their conflict inherent in the nature of things, is one of the signatures of Marxism. That being the case, people who want nothing to do with Marxism quite naturally want nothing to do with class analysis. So ...
Lessons in Living from Great-Grandma Ladd by Ridgway K. Foley Jr. May 1, 2006 From the first glance, she evoked the quiet self-reliance and rectitude that imbued the spirit of the American pioneer. She favored long homemade dresses of faded, flowered print. Tall for her generation, and thin and angular to the point of gauntness, she often looked sober but not severe, although at times a slight smile creased her face. She outlived ...
What Is the Enemy? by Sheldon Richman April 1, 2006 As libertarians, what should we view as the great institutional threat to liberty? The most common answer is socialism. But that is far too general to be helpful because it leaves unspecified what kind of socialism and in the service of whose interests. In one sense the answers to those questions are unimportant: any (state) socialism threatens freedom. (Socialism ...
Revisiting a Libertarian Classic: Nock’s Our Enemy, the State by Sheldon Richman March 1, 2006 Were spied on by the federal government, often without even a warrant from the submissive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The government has gathered information on anti-war groups and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. The president is angry that ordinary people have found out about this. He is planning not to stop these obnoxious activities, but rather to ...
Mary Wollstonecraft by Wendy McElroy February 1, 2006 O, why was I born with a different face? Why was I not born like this envious race? Why did Heaven adorn me with bountiful hand, And then set me down in an envious land? William Blake’s poem “Mary” (1803) could have been an epitaph for Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) — a woman born with a “different face” in a society hostile to her ...
Lysander Spooner, Part 2 by Wendy McElroy November 1, 2005 Part 1 | Part 2 The right of people to defend themselves against the usurpation of government was the central theme of Spooner’s next major work, An Essay on the Trial by Jury (1852), which some consider his masterpiece. Benjamin Tucker stated the gist of Trial by Jury: “No man should be punished for an offence unless ...
Lysander Spooner, Part 1 by Wendy McElroy October 1, 2005 Part 1 | Part 2 The 19th-century individualist anarchist Benjamin Tucker called Lysander Spooner “our Nestor,” a Greek name denoting “wisdom.” The 20th-century libertarian Murray Rothbard referred to Spooner as “the last of the great natural rights theorists ... the last of the Old Guard believers in natural rights.” Natural-rights or natural-law theory, as espoused by Spooner, is ...
A Methodology for Hope by Jacob G. Hornberger September 1, 2005 A major adverse consequence of the 9/11 attacks has been a feeling of resignation that has come over some advocates of liberty. The feeling is that, given 9/11 and the “war on terrorism,” the omnipotent state is here to stay for the indefinite future. As difficult as it was to restore libertarian principles to our country in the pre–9/11 ...