Monthly Archives: June 2011

From Julian Sanchez, who has been kind of a featured guest-star here this past week: a look at the moral confusion that erupts when people who voluntarily earn less than they could demand higher taxes from those who are maximizing … Continue reading →

I don’t agree with his line of argument supporting President Obama’s lack of interest in involving Congress in the Libya war, but I do respect Akhil Reed Amar as a scholar. So I’m linking to this anyway, in the interest … Continue reading →

Last week I posted a link to a story about a woman in Rochester, NY who was arrested by the cops for videotaping them (from a distance, without interfering) during a traffic stop. Here’s a brief follow-up from The Agitator, … Continue reading →

Conservatives have been chipping away for years at the estate tax, a modest tax (well, all right — not that modest) on the children of extremely wealthy people when those children receive enormous windfalls for no work at all, i.e., … Continue reading →

Like everybody in L.A., I was intrigued when our local paper-of-record claimed to have combed through the publicly-available data on all the teachers in the LAUSD and computed the relative educational “value” each contributed to his students, as measured by … Continue reading →

Well, this is certainly a sweet moment: [T]he Senate vote marked the first time a Republican-controlled legislative chamber in any state has supported same-sex marriage, and several prominent Republican donors contributed to the lobbying campaign on behalf of the bill. … Continue reading →

Metcalf takes to the pages of Slate to defend his takedown of Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia. The whole thing’s worth a read, but here’s his response to Julian Sanchez, whose criticisms of Metcalf’s take on the Wilt Chamberlain … Continue reading →

I already posted this on Facebook, so apologies to anybody who’s seeing it twice. But there are a couple of interesting things about a recent Supreme Court decision, Janus Capital Group, Inc. v. First Derivative Traders. The first, as the … Continue reading →

Ruh-roh, Raggy. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution‘s Jay Bookman is reporting that Georgia’s draconian anti-illegal-immigrant bill, House Bill 87, signed last month by Gov. Nathan Deal, has actually worked. And that turns out to be bad for the Georgia economy: The resulting … Continue reading →

Yesterday, inspired by Stephen Metcalf’s essay on Robert Nozick, I compared libertarianism to kudzu — you bring it in to prevent the erosion of your civil rights, and the next thing you know it’s taken over everything. Then you have … Continue reading →