Happy 10 Year Anniversary To Us! Here Are Our Ten Best Posts

We’ve been around for 10 years now. We’ve gone through quite a few changes since that time period. It was hard to grade which of the many posts that have been published as the ten best posts.

The contributors were asked to rate what they thought were the ten best posts published on the site. Some kind of approval voting method was used. I didn’t conduct the election, so I don’t have a clue how the votes were counted.

It wound up breaking down to 9 second place posts and 1 clear winner. We’ll start with the nine runners up in no particular order.

T-2Humans Are Pack Animals Who Pretend To Reason” by Brad Warbany. Published on April 22, 2015.

We think we’re soooo smart.

Humans. We think we come up with our political positions through reasoned analysis, and then join the political party that’s aligned to our beliefs. We’re ideologically honest and consistent. We’re dispassionate referees looking at evidence and argument and making informed choices.

And we’ve always been at war with Eastasia, right?

The truth is that this is all a bunch of bull. We’re pack animals. Human reason has done amazing things for us as a species, but we’re still pack animals imbued with an “us vs them” mentality, and that continually trumps the weak “reason” we rely upon.

T-2The Politics Of Liberty” by Chris Byrne. Published on December 2, 2005.

I want to talk about what I believe in.

I’m a small “l” libertarian, but a lot of people don’t know what that means. I used to describe myself as a “disgruntled constructive anarchist”. I thought it might be an opportune time to explain what I mean by that.

T-2Sorry To Disappoint, But Getting Government Out Of Marriage Is A Fantasy” by Kevin Boyd. Published on June 30, 2015.

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision making gay marriage legal in all 50 states, the rally cry of many libertarians and conservatives is to get government out of marriage. Presidential candidate and Kentucky Senator Rand Paul wrote an op-ed suggesting just that. While that’s a tempting proposition, it’s probably not possible without a major overhaul of everything from government benefits to nearly the entire civil and family legal code.

T-2Sympathy For Paranoia” by Stephen Littau. Published February 23, 2015.

The moon landing was faked by the U.S. government for propaganda purposes to win the Cold War. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 was actually an inside job as a pretext to go to war. Space aliens landed in Roswell, NM but the government has been covering it up. The Sandy Hook massacre was faked to increase support for new gun control laws; the “victims” were actually actors who are all alive and well today. The Illuminati is the secret entity which actually governs the whole world…

T-2The Case Against An Article V Convention” by Doug Mataconis. Published on April 1, 2010.

We were also lucky in 1787 because of the men who gathered to write the Constitution. The values they shared were values of individual liberty and small government. Does anyone truly believe that we’d be lucky enough to have delegates to a 2013 Convention, say, that were anywhere near the intellectual and moral calibre of Madison, or Mason, or Franklin ? Yea, I didn’t think so.

T-2The Sovereign Individual” by Eric. Published on November 25, 2005.

As usual, I appear to find myself in the smallest minority, the one that understands that rights and responsibility are inherent. They aren’t things that one can, or cannot, “take”. They are part of the state of being. And they are not affected by what sort of community one lives within, or government that one is subject to. Indeed, the core understanding of my principles is that the individual is sovereign. Ayn Rand once said “The smallest minority on earth is the individual.

T-2The Minimum Wage Lie” by Chris Byrne. Published on January 3, 2015.

When “progressives” say “the minimum wage hasn’t kept up with inflation”, they’re lying.

Not shading, the truth, exaggerating, or interpreting things differently… they are flat out lying.

… And what’s more, the ones who made up the lie in the first place, know they’re lying (the rest mostly just parrot what they’ve been told).

T-2The Problem With Today’s ‘Conservatives’: They’re Not Really Conservative” by Kevin Boyd. Published on January 7, 2015.

The biggest problem however, is that the Tea Party, and many of the self identified “conservatives” aren’t really conservatives at all. They’re really populists, ideologues, and radicals, that have abandoned traditional conservatism.

Ultimately, this is bad for the entirety of what could be called the “center-right”, because these people frankly make us look insane. When you try to build a movement purely on rhetoric and rabble rousing, without a solid foundation, history has shown that bad things happen.

T-2Bullshit Laws, Fiscal Irresponsibility, and the Inevitability of Police Abuse” by Sarah Baker. Published on August 11, 2015.

Every day fleets of law enforcement officers, from the DEA on down to the local police department, head out onto the streets armed with guns and hair-trigger fears for their own safety.

If they were going to fight the good fight against violence and theft, we could be unreservedly grateful. All too often these armed ingenues, represented by unions, covered by workers comp, and unwilling to tolerate any degree of risk to their person, instead spend their time enforcing petty, bullshit laws that accomplish nothing more than mindless bureaucratic authoritarianism—and revenue for overspent budgets.

The first place post was a clear winner. It was by one of our newer contributors, Albert Northrup.

1Why Conservatives and Libertarians Should Oppose The Death Penalty” by Albert Northrup. January 8, 2015.

Are you pro-life? Opposed to big government? Do you believe in reducing government spending? Do you support the death penalty? If you answered yes to all of these questions, then you may want to re-think your position on the death penalty. As supporters of life, liberty, property, and limited government, I believe that all conservatives and libertarians should oppose the death penalty.

Of course these 10 posts are just a small sample of what’s been published so far. Please read them, tweet them out, post them on social media, and more importantly stay tuned for what else we have coming over the next 10 years.

I’m one of the original co-founders of The Liberty Papers all the way back in 2005. Since then, I wound up doing this blogging thing professionally. Now I’m running the site now. You can find my other work at The Hayride.com and Rare. You can also find me over at the R Street Institute.