From regular reader Akston: Emotions are the engine which often drives our efforts. Rationality is the steering wheel. Having one without the other is always problematic. Agreed. And as we’ve seen, this tends to be the case with modern American democratic politics.

From Ezra Klein: “The revenue loss over the next 75 years just from extending the tax cuts for people making over $250,000 — the top 2 percent of Americans — would be about as large as the entire Social Security shortfall over this period,” write Kathy Ruffing and Paul N. Van de Water at the [...]

The Economist’s Babbage, on computing education: That, for me, sums up the seductive intellectual core of computers and computer programming: here is a magic black box. You can tell it to do whatever you want, within a certain set of rules, and it will do it; within the confines of the box you are more [...]

Some things you just cannot make up: A device designed to control unruly inmates by blasting them with a beam of intense energy that causes a burning sensation is drawing heat from civil rights groups who fear it could cause serious injury and is “tantamount to torture.” The mechanism, known as an “Assault Intervention Device,” [...]

Its one thing when anti-death penalty activists petition a governor to pardon or commute a sentence of an individual scheduled for execution but quite another when death penalty supporters agree. Kevin Keith is scheduled to be executed by the state of Ohio on September 15th for the 1994 murders of 2 adults and 1 child; [...]

This is one of the Texas congressman’s best appearances since the heyday of his presidential run. I’ll admit my enthusiasm for him has waned mostly due to his son and a lot of the people who have associated themselves with Paul. Paul himself, however, is consistently a voice of reason over the irrationality and hatred [...]

It seems that this case needs to be made again and again, generation after generation. Well here it is.

It’s beginning to be really easy to hate Facebook. While Google has stuck to its libertarian principles of free exchange of information by not cooperating with Chinese censorship, Facebook has become more and more creepy: The people behind the “Just Say Now” marijuana legalization campaign (oft-Boinged Salon contributor Glenn Greenwald is one of many political [...]

A great comment from Obdicut, which I found in the jungle of my last post’s comment thread: Michael, I’m sorry posting this has led to the stalkers having one of their uber-bizarre meltdowns in the thread. It’s a well-reasoned piece. I too, as an atheist who is against extremist religion of all forms, including Islam, [...]

Building off of Stephen’s post on Jon Stewart revisiting his past transgressions, I thought it would be worth exploring how my own previous writing and those of others across the political spectrum provided an opening for the pure ugliness of Newt Gingrich, Pam Geller, Michelle Bachmann and the like in the wake of the “Ground [...]

I used to think that Jon Stewart was another garden variety left winger but lately, I’ve found him to be perhaps the most reasonable political commentator anywhere. Whether the issue is the controversial South Park episode featuring the prophet Mohammed, Obama’s about face on civil liberties now that he is president, or this most recent [...]

This story isn’t really that significant, but it’s a case in point of copyright absurdity: Madonna is being sued for using the name “Material Girl,” a reference to her hit 80s song, in her juniors clothing line designed with her daughter Lourdes. Clothing maker LA Triumph says it’s been using the name to market clothes [...]

A friend of mine who I worked with at a hip-hop magazine years ago was a big influence on me turning toward libertarianism. He said this on the mosque fiasco: The next person who tells me Ground Zero is ‘hallowed’ or ‘sacred’ ground, is getting punched in the balls. If it really were special, it [...]

In his post that started this debate, Brad Warbiany makes this point about the idea that the individual states have the power, or at least the right, to make declarations as to the Constitutionality of Federal laws: Nullification is the civil disobedience of Federalism. Is it legal? No. After all, the Supremacy Clause and judicial [...]

What makes a prosperous, first-world, liberal society tick? How did America become the world’s great superpower? What is the fabric that keeps this together? Below are the answers as I see them, from the three main American schools of political thought. The Progressive The progressive believes that the fabric of society is government. He does [...]

Ernie Suggs of The Atlanta Constitution reports: Four years after rogue APD narcotics officers killed 92-year-old Kathryn Johnston during an illegal raid of her home, Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed has offered her family a $4.9 million settlement. […] Reed said the resolution of the case is an important healing step for the city and the [...]

Here: My alternate plan would be to cut everyone back to 32 hours a week, cut their pay by 20%, AND save energy on Friday. By “alternate” I mean alternate to my base case of sending them all home permanently and waiting to see how long it takes for anyone to notice. Since I was [...]

I did a critique as well as a defense of the ACLU for TLP not too long ago, but another aspect of the ACLU’s approach to defending civil liberties seemed worthy of analysis. Here goes. On my Facebook feed this evening, I found this snibbet: Every student deserves the opportunity to attend school and learn [...]

When I first heard Pat Buchanan talking about Palestine and Israel as a politically naive teenager, I thought he was a conservative who broke from the path because he thought the Palestinians had been mistreated. Things are obviously a lot more complicated than that. Given Pat Buchanan’s proclamation that America is “a country built by [...]

While I regularly disagree with Ezra Klein, I believe that honestly one of the main differences between him and many libertarians is that he still has faith in the political system. He’s smart, he understands incentives, he just refuses to take the next step and start understanding public choice theory and the malincentives rampant in [...]