Must-Read Books of 2010

“Do you have a soulmate?” the shrink asked Will Hunting.  A soulmate, someone who challenges you.  ”Shakespeare, Nietzsche, Frost, O’Connor, Kant, Pope, Locke…” replied the precious brat. “That’s great; they’re all dead.” “Not to me they’re not.” This is one of my favorite scenes from Good Will Hunting. Both characters have a point.  The written [...]

Why Freedom?

Sometime during the late 80′s or early 90′s, George H.W. Bush delivered a speech in which he waxed eloquent about what is generally called the fall of communism, the wave of revolution that swept Eastern Europe at the end of the Cold War.  In this allocution he said that tyranny fell “not to the force [...]

From one kind of murder to another

Barack Obama may be predisposed to commit fewer war crimes than his predecessor, though we must express such hopes with due caution if not downright skepticism, but one area on which he has turned the tables in the Murder-by-State department is abortion. Obama has promised to push for the passage of FOCA, the Freedom of [...]

Secretary of the Arts!?

Got this from a Facebook friend who will remain nameless — a Secretary of the Arts Petition: To:  President-Elect Barack Obama Congratulations and thank you for all you do. Your good friend Quincy Jones said: “…next conversation I have with President Obama is to beg for a Secretary of Arts.” [November 14th 2008 WNYC interview [...]

The dynamic tension between Albert Jay Nock and Murray Rothbard

In his book Egalitarianism as a Revolt against Nature, Murray Rothbard confronts the cynicism of Albert Jay Nock and asserts that such outlooks on life lead inevitably to conservatism. To the Nock enthusiast this can be a jolting statement to contend with. At first one might not want to believe what Rothbard is saying, but [...]

Where does an anarchist find order?

We have spent only a little time on this blog discussing the virtues of anarchy and the ways that it would play out in real life. In a previous post, I mentioned that anarchists, far from advocating chaos, promote a system of order that does not make use of the State or of the government. [...]

The Scary “A” Word

A few months back, I was having a conversation with an atheist who made the point that atheists don’t necessarily believe in no god, just that they don’t believe in God–the monotheistic God of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. This is a worthy distinction to make, one which gets lost in most conversations about religion. Perhaps [...]