Thursday, August 7, 2008

Should a libertarian vote for a populist?











Tuesday, August 5, 2008

The Power of One

Radley Balko yesterday broke the news that the State of Mississippi is removing Steven Hayne from its list of approved medical examiners. Balko has been pursuing Hayne for quite some time, most famously in this magnificent Reason piece, and only Balko has any idea of what he has dedicated to bringing down Hayne's profiteering at the expense of the freedom of who-knows-how-many innocents. While others such as the Innocence Project have certainly done their share of yeoman's work leading to this tremendous (but only initial) victory, Balko perhaps deserves a huge amount of credit for putting this perversion of justice in the public eye. Certainly without his work, it is difficult to see how the local media in Mississippi would have fully pursued this story.

As hopeless as political participation may often seem for libertarians, Balko's work proves that there are ways to make the world a little bit more free that don't involve the ballot box.

Monday, August 4, 2008

That may be so. However...

Kip at A Stitch in Haste, pointing out the Left's penchant for moral authoritarianism, writes:

Does [Ezra] Klein have the intellectual horsepower, I wonder, to realize just how much like a certain other group of majoritarians his argument sounds? His reasoning is utterly indistinguishable from that of the most decrepit anti-gay bigots who seek to ban something a tad more substantive than a fast food restaurant. What a delicious sampling of the faux difference between liberals and conservatives: “power to impose our will on others” … versus “power to impose our will on others.”

This is plain as day to libertarians and there is nothing I disagree with here. Both groups, when their sensibilities are outraged, will seek remedies through government intervention if the opportunity exists to do so.

Unfortuneately, to Kip's question, I'm not sure if the Left will ever get the point, and I think it is more a function of indifference towards the similarity rather than not having the intellectual wherewithall to recognize it.

Anecdotally, when I have engaged in these sorts of discussions with liberals and point these things out, the response that I typically get is a defense of their views under fairness, equality and making things better off for people as a whole, a view they do not have about social conservatives. It seems to boil down to a "mine is better/we know what's best" mentally that dismisses the notion that other "inferior" groups could be similar to them, especially that they believe they are working to move society forward and others are trying to move society backward (it would explain the more juvenile attacks towards libertarians that come from the Left).

Not so anecdotally, one can read Paul Krugman's Conscience of a Liberal and observe much of what I wrote above.