Note: earlier today I quoted a comment by Mario Rizzo. As Rizzo explains here, he requested that his comment be taken down. Out of respect for Dr. Rizzo, I’ve deleted the substance of my post.
Physicist Howard Hayden, a staunch advocate of sound energy policy, sent me a copy of his letter to the EPA about global warming. The text is also appended below, with permission.
As noted in my post Access to Energy, Hayden helped the late, great Petr Beckmann found the dissident physics journal Galilean Electrodynamics (brochures and further Beckmann info here; further dissident physics links). Hayden later began to publish his own pro-energy newsletter, The Energy Advocate, following in the footsteps of Beckmann’s own journal Access to Energy.
I love Hayden’s email sign-off, “People will do anything to save the world … except take a course in science.” Here’s the letter:
[continue reading…]
Latest Libertarian Papers article: “The Definition of Inflation According to Mises: Implications for the Debate on Free Banking,” by Nicolás Cachanosky.
Abstract: The discussion of what is and what is not inflation has become central among the Austrian economists in their debate between free banking with fractional reserves versus banking with 100-percent reserve. Many Austrians also turn to the writings of Mises to find out what the dean of Austrian Economics thought about inflation, but there is no agreement on the interpretation of his writings either. This article tries to contribute to the interpretation of Mises’ concept of inflation.
[Mises blog cross-post]
The most rational argument I’ve seen for belief in God (and the Christian version, in particular) is the “spiral argument” of Catholicism.
Much better, more rational, than anything I’ve ever seen among Protestants.
And I fail to see how any Protestant can listen to conversion stories like the one of Scott Hahn and not waver.
I listen every week to various conversion stories, on EWTN’s The Journey Home, e.g., and find it fascinating. Dunno why.
Related previous post: The Unidirectionality of Conversions
In “Classical Liberalism versus Anarchocapitalism” (originally published in Property, Freedom and Society: Essays in Honor of Hans-Hermann Hoppe (2009)), Jesus Huerta de Soto provides an excellent chart (above) that I think is superior to the Nolan Chart (below).
See also Tom Knapp’s political spectrum bell curve: “On the far Left (market anarchism) and the far Right (anarcho-capitalism), appetite for political government trails off to zero (which is why “Left” and “Right” libertarians have so much in common).”
Tom Knapp’s Political Spectrum Bell Curve
Update: See also the Political Triangle (from Twitter):
I’m reading Jennifer Burns’s excellent biography of Rand, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right. She mentions that one of Rand’s first suitors in Russia was a guy named Seriozha. I could not help but be reminded of Rothbard’s derisive term “dimwit and serioso libertarians“.
The recent Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences (BPAI) decision, Ex parte Rodriguez (discussed here), is a good example of the completely arbitrary, artificial nature of patent law. This is what counts as the meat and bones of natural “justice” in the IP world. This opinion discusses the relationship between the Patent Act’s Sec. 112, 6th and 1st paragraphs, and clarifies why and under what conditions a functional claim limitation that is not a means-plus-function recitation may be invalid under Sec. 112, 1st para. for lack of enablement. Blah blah blah.
How anyone can think this is possibly compatible with libertarian principle is beyond me. No offense, Randians.
[AM cross-post]
Solar energy is too dilute to ever be the main energy source, even if we got 100% efficient solar cells. See Beckmann, Petr, Why “Soft” Technology Will Not Be America’s Energy Salvation; other material by Beckmann here. [See also my post Access to Energy (archived comments)]
[See also
“A Note on Intellectual Property and Externalities,” by Hardy Bouillon, Mises Daily (Oct. 27, 2009), originally published in Property, Freedom and Society: Essays in Honor of Hans-Hermann Hoppe (2009).
[AM cross-post]
Who Owns You? Corporations Patenting Your Genes
A debate between IP opponent David Koepsell and patent attorney Gene Quinn about gene patents. As noted in IP Debate? (see also Gene Quinn the Patent Watchdog and Is It So Crazy For A Patent Attorney To Think Patents Harm Innovation?), Quinn previously said he wanted to debate an IP opponent, before transparently banning me from his site after I called his bluff; then David Koepsell offered to debate Quinn–it was supposed to be held yesterday at Cardozo law school, but then Quinn backed out, and finally agreed to the online thing you see above. Good thing for him he was not there face to face to present his embarrassingly weak “arguments.”
[AM cross-post]
I’ve discussed the libertarian legitimacy of the corporation before (Defending Corporations: Block and Huebert; Legitimizing the Corporation and Other Posts). I recently re-read Roger Pilon’s Corporations and Rights: On Treating Corporate People Justly, and recalled that it also has some very good material on why limited liability does not give any special privilege to shareholders. The following is an edited version of an email discussion mutualist Kevin Carson and I had about this (reprinted with Kevin’s permission):
KINSELLA: I had forgotten how good Pilon is in his discussion of why limited liability for torts is justified–have you seen this (pp. 1309-16)? He makes the arguments similar to those I have made–that the problem is respondeat superior. There is no reason to hold a shareholder liable in the first place.
CARSON: But as I’ve argued before in response to such arguments, the creation of the corporate form creates an artificially tenuous relationship between property and responsibility, precisely because the “owner” can seek a form of “ownership” in which control is lacking ex ante. IOW, plausible deniability: “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” [continue reading…]
[On the official name of the fedgov, see grok]
In other words, U.S. States are simply not libertarian minarchist states. A minarchist state has strictly limited and defined powers, but states are not so limited. U.S. states–indeed, all modern states in the world today, have much broader powers than permitted even by libertarian minarchist theory. The one exception is the US federal government: it actually has less power than a minarchist state would (in some areas): for example a minarchist state could outlaw and prosecute murder; the federal government may not. (Of course there are things the feds are empowered to do that a minarchist state would not be, e.g. tax, draft, build roads, coin money.)
So you can think of modern states as having a wide set of powers, which is a superset of the powers of a minarchist state. The US federal government, by contrast, has a set of powers that only intersects with the minarchist set of powers–it has some powers a libertarian state would not; but it lacks some powers that a libertarian state would have, due to the uniquely federal and limited nature of the federal government’s original charter.
***
What Brayton and his ilk don’t seem to realize is that our federal structure is unique. Our federal state has fewer powers than most normal states; it may not outlaw murder, for example, even though murder is definitely a crime. When a state is created that is defined by and authorized by a Constitution, its self-proclaimed authority is also conditioned on its adherence to the limits placed on it in that Constitution. If that Constitution does not authorize the state to stop another given state from doing something bad, then it simply does not authorize it, even if we might want it to; and if it ignores this limit, then the danger is now that it has established the principle–and we have ratified it–that it is not really bound at all by the limits placed on it. That is, that it is an unlimited state. Brayton and Sandefur may have no problem with an unlimited state–but we libertarians do. (They may protest that they are in favor of constitutional limits on the state–that is, that the state limit itself. Yeah. Good luck. The only real limit would be external to the state: which is exactly what vertical checks and balances (federalism) is all about, which Brayton and Sandefur reject.)
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