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Showing posts from 2009

Can a Libertarian Also Be a Conservative?

For interested readers, here’s the text of my (unsuccessful) submission to this year’s Chris R. Tame Memorial Prize essay contest. * * * * * I Depending on the meaning of conservative , it may be that a libertarian should be a conservative, that a libertarian might be a conservative, or that a libertarian should not be a conservative. A libertarian, I take it, is someone who is for liberty and against aggression. The libertarian doesn’t like to be pushed around, and doesn’t like to see other people pushed around, either. The libertarian will likely affirm some version of what I will call the libertarian principle , and will have good reason as well to embrace the libertarian ideal . In its strongest form, the libertarian principle holds that someone may rightly use force against the person or property of another only to prevent or end an unjust attack or to secure compensation for the damage done by such an attack. On weaker versions, the initiation of force, while infrequently per

MakerBot and Deletionism

I had never heard of desktop manufacturing before I began reading the on-line drafts of Kevin Carson’s bracing Organization Theory . But when I read Kevin’s discussion of the concept, I was floored—and very excited. MakerBot is a new (at least to me) addition to the industry. And for anyone interested in a decentralized manufacturing model, its arrival on the scene ought to be of some interest for its own sake. But I want to use its appearance as an occasion for a rant on another topic. A few minutes ago, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales posted a Facebook status update alerting people to MakerBot’s existence. He wrote that he was surprised by the absence of a Wikipedia article about the company, which struck him (surely rightly) as doing exciting things. I decided to look on Wikipedia for an article on MakerBot. Not surprisingly, someone who’s Wales’s friend on Facebook (or, perhaps, if his status updates also appear on Twitter, one of his Twitter follower) created a stub regarding the c

An Anarchist Text?

Is Economic Justice and Natural Law an anarchist text? I am a market anarchist: I reject the legitimacy of any entity that claims or seeks to exercise a monopoly of force in a given territory and I favor the existence of legal rules in a stateless society that would protect property rights and market exchanges. That will obvious to anyone who’s read this blog or comments I’ve made elsewhere on-line. And it will be, if anything, more obvious to anyone who’s read my forthcoming book The Conscience of an Anarchist . It may not be so clear, however, to anyone who reads Economic Justice and Natural Law . I reflected on this with a little amusement when I visited the book’s Amazon page yesterday. People who’d purchased “related items” had “also bought,” e.g. , Human Action and Ron Paul’s End the Fed . What would readers of End the Fed think of EJNL ? I suspected that a number of them would be puzzled. To be sure, EJNL is primarily about what it is reasonable for individuals to do, not a