REPUBLIC REBORN

The Week: The death of local news

Reason: Tariffs on steel, aluminum, and lumber blamed for spiking home construction prices

LA Times: In a trade war, everyone loses

Techdirt: ‘Five Eyes’ surveillance agencies say encryption is good, except when it keeps them from looking at stuff

Washington Post: That time a President deported 1 million immigrants for “stealing” American jobs

TAC: Industrial poison: The third phase of an overdose boom

The Federalist: Is a toxic public school environment behind increases in child suicides?

National Review: Mr. President, the problem is FISA, not the lack of hearings on FISA warrants

High Times: Malaysian court sentences man to death for distributing free cannabis oil

FEE: Venezuela’s nightmare is a tragedy, but not a surprise

New documentary, The Modern Surveillance State

This one from page 413 of Nassim Taleb’s highly readable 2012 book, Antifragile:

“…the more complicated the regulation, the more prone to arbitrage by insiders. This is another argument in favor of heuristics. Twenty-three hundred pages of regulation–something I can replace with Hammurabi’s Rule–will be a gold mine for former regulators. The incentive of a regulator is to have complex regulation. The insiders are the enemies of the less-is-more rule. 

…the difference between the letter and the spirit of regulation is harder to detect in a complex system. The point is technical, but complex environments with nonlinearities are easier to game than linear ones with a small number of variables. The same applies to the gap between the legal and the ethical. 

…in African countries, government officials get explicit bribes. In the United States they have the implicit, never mentioned, promise to go to work for a bank at a later date with a sinecure offering, say $5 million a year, if they are seen favorably by the industry. And the “regulations” of such activities are easily skirted.”

Taleb is describing regulatory capture, which is the main argument against government-created “regulation” of any particular industry. The officials staffing each regulatory agency are, in effect, future employees of the industries they’re currently tasked with regulating.  If a politician is in need of an off-the-books payoff, he ‘writes’ a “New York Times best seller”, and gets his money, nice and laundered. These are the ones you see in bookstores with a picture of a middle-aged man or woman, crap-eating grin on their face, entitled some variation of “Honor and Duty”.

Taleb’s book is charming, creative, arrogant, and fun to read.

Activist Post: Profit before safety: Why are legal exemption lines drawn for Big Pharma?

Claremore Daily Progress: Number of medical marijuana entrepreneurs in Oklahoma higher than expected

Military: When it comes to medical marijuana, veterans often have to improvise

Reason: Anti-pot staffers conspire to turn Trump against marijuana federalism

Ars Technica: Cheese danish shipping, warrantless GPS trackers, and a border doctrine challenge

The Blaze: Report: Google, Mastercard cut secret deal to track offline purchases

The Free Thought Project: Family outraged after cop shoots a dog that was on a leash

City Lab: Militarization of local police isn’t making anyone safer

Consortium News: The unlikely force behind US prison reform

The Intercept: Donald Trump;s former ICE chief to be honored at notorious anti-Muslim convention

Common Dreams: As Saudis say bombings of Yemeni children mere ‘mistakes’, growing calls for US to stop fueling atrocities

WSWS: The canonization of John McCain: Media, political establishment turn warmonger into a saint

The Federalist: Why regulation will only make Google and Facebook’s bias worse

Boston Globe: Your government has a secret kill list. Is that okay with you?

The Atlantic: Why technology favors tyranny

Engadget: New lawsuit shows your phone is unsafe at US borders

Antiwar.com: NATO think tank continues US pre-election interference

Techdirt: Police union offers citizens $500 to assist cops in their take-downs and beat-downs of suspects

LUCY STEIGERWALD: If police really put American lives ahead of their own, they’d hurt fewer people

RYAN MCMAKEN: We don’t need the UN to regulate baby formula

Motherboard: The new hunt for dark matter is taking place under a mountain

High Times: Study suggests CBD may have anipsychotic effects in high-risk individuals

…is from Bernard Mandelville’s 1705 poem, and powder keg that ignited the creative explosion known as the ‘Scottish Revolution’ that saw the publication of the masterworks of Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith, and all the way to Carl Menger, Hayek, and, in my mind at least, Shackle, Lachmann, and Schutz. That poem is Fable of the Bees:

“The Root of evil Avarice,
That damn ill-natur’d baneful vice,
Was slave to Prodigality,
That Noble Sin; whilst Luxury
Employ’d a Million of the Poor,
And odious Pride a Million more.
Envy it self, and Vanity
Were Ministers of Industry;
Their darling Folly, Fickleness
In Diet, Furniture, and Dress,
That strange ridic’lous Vice, was made
The very Wheel, that turn’d the Trade.”

Mandeville’s poem was considered, in its day, to be a heretical attack on Christian virtues. To serve the myriad “vices” of human nature, markets arose that in turn employed far more than the moral hectoring of the impoverished Church. It is a wonder to read, and can be found in full online. Reading it, it’s easy to see its role as progenitor to the works of Smith, Ferguson, and Hayek.

National Review: No, the government should not interfere with Google’s search results

The Federalist: Even newly-corrected data doesn’t support claims that Scandinavia is socialist

FEE: A future of perfectly efficient traffic law enforcement? No thanks.

Ars Technica: UK cops used facial recognition at show, found someone with outstanding warrant Ed: I prefer an inefficient police state, thanks.

Cato: U.S. citizens targeted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Texas

Washington Post: Our fruit is rotting in the trees as laborers are kept out of the country

WSWS: UN panel cites massive war crimes in US-backed war on Yemen

The American Conservative: Corporate welfare lives on and on

Reason: Federal survey wildly overestimates number of school shootings

Techcrunch: Privacy groups ask senators to confirm US surveillance oversight nominees

ACLU: ACLU seeks more info on Los Angeles subway body scanners

EFF: Appeals court asks the right questions in NSA surveillance case

DANIEL LARISON: Why the U.S. never learns from foreign policy failures Ed: Actually, “failure” is in the eye of the beholder. If money, debt, and the consolidation of power through tyrannical legislation are the true goals of endless war, than it should be seen as a success. And, if these are the goals, then they have been wildly successful. For the US foreign policy Establishment that is enriched by endless war, they learned the lesson long ago that endless war is the path to endless riches. For them.

High Times: Rasta Relish: The ultimate cannabis-infused condiment

Fox25: Chris Powell secures Libertarian nomination in Oklahoma gubernatorial race

The Intercept: World’s leading human rights groups tell Google to cancel its China censorship plan

FEE: California takes steps to undo some of the damage caused by marijuana prohibition

Activist Post: First generation of autonomous killer robots ready to seek and destroy invasive fish

Truthdig: A private investigator on living in a surveillance culture

Consortium News: How the Department of Homeland Security created a deceptive tale of Russia hacking US voter sites

PAT BUCHANAN: The interventionists lose their leader

RYAN MCMAKEN: You can’t be both “pro-military” and “pro-Second Amendment”

Reason: 5 cops were ‘justified’ in brutal beating of unarmed black man, investigators say

JOHN WHITEHEAD: Warrior cops endanger our lives and our freedom Ed: All your ‘Punisher’ imagery just communicates to me that you’re looking for an excuse to be violent

Ars Technica: Social science has a complicated, infinitely tricky replication crisis

Reuters: One in seven US adults used marijuana in 2017

Reason: ‘Cannabis-involved’ traffic fatalities fall in Colorado

Never thought I’d be linking to the Weather Channel, but…Police dog dies after being left in hot car for 6 hours

Defense One: What I learned by studying militarized policing

The Guardian: US bombs are killing children in Yemen. Does anybody care?

JUSTIN RAIMONDO: John McCain and the warrior spirit in American foreign policy: “In his person, and his public pronouncements, McCain was the perfect representative of the nascent imperial class: born in the Panama Canal zone, the son of an Admiral, he was almost fated to become what he did indeed become – the archetypal Praetorian, the veritable embodiment of America’s post-World War II empire. A paladin of the cold war while it lasted, and a tireless advocate of post-cold war hegemonism, his favorite phrase was “boots on the ground,” and he championed this as a policy option for virtually every foreign policy problem confronted by US policymakers.”

The Intercept: A little-known story about John McCain and his fantasies of benevolent U.S. foreign policy

Independent: Vietnam demands Monsanto pay compensation for Agent Orange victims

Gray Zone Project: Big Tech corporations now banning Iranian social media accounts. A censored journalist speaks out.

DAVID FRENCH: Protestants should care deeply about the Catholic catastrophe

Spectator: Socialism, a crime against humanity

The Federalist: The murder of Mollie Tibbetts is a reason to loosen immigration laws, not restrict them Ed: This is an important perspective, but not quite the one I’ve had in mind as I’ve pondered the meaning of the murder. Restrictive immigration laws, along with an entire bureaucracy devoted to the intimidation and dehumanization of every person within 100 miles of the US/Mexico border creates similar outcomes to the Drug War: a black market, but this time in human labor. It incentivizes the dangerous and amoral to brave the border-hopping ordeal. The solution would be fairly simple: do a simple, quick background check for criminal history and let them in immediately. Don’t inquire where they’re going, or who they know, just let them in. Mexican immigration is an organic phenomenon: most of those who come over have relatives here and have an immediate employment opportunity. Let them in. The decent and law-abiding will then come over.  Nice people who work hard are what this country appears to need. Inciting some jingoistic “protect our borders” nationalism radiates from the same source as “spread American values!”. The wonderful thing about this immigration is that these people are assimilating into the Hayekian catallactic web: they are inserting themselves into the market economy, thereby strengthening the “invisible hand” of the market, creating all sorts of wealth that will never be attributed to them by anyone in power. And, to be honest, to better protect our border, we must open the border up.

MIKE MUNGER: The origin and meaning of profits

FEE: Chicago’s electronic surveillance of food trucks is ridiculous. And probably Unconstitutional.

Big Think: We live in a zombie galaxy that died and came back to life, claims new study

GQ: Why psychedelic drugs are entering the psychiatric industry

Today has seen a huge spike in pageviews for RR, which appears to be clicks initially checking out the most recent Quote of the Day. Much appreciated, but this page is focused on the philosophy of liberty and thoughts on a path toward realizing liberty in our lifetime. Personal stories digressive of this goal will be rare. Aside from that, welcome! There will be new content every day, along with quotes I’ve found interesting and relevant. Most quotes come from writers that have influenced my thinking the most: Hayek, Mises, Shackle, Lachmann, Shutz, and even the occasional Keynes quote. Keynes’s fame is due more so to his location in history: 1930’s Cambridge, England, rather than any original contribution to economic thought. His policy prescriptions made him famous, because they provided the hitherto lacking academic justification for massive state intervention into the market economy. Shackle is the far superior thinker and writer whose felicity of phrase articulates the strange and kaleidic world we move through without even noticing.  I post quotes from these relatively obscure thinkers because their ideas contain the weapon to be used when the State’s coven of intellectual class descends into battle. Every government in history has surrounded itself with priests, shamans, and wavers of incense, to give the State an aura of consecration and protection.  Modern governments are no different, but now they surround themselves with economists, historians, philosophers, to protect the rationale for total government.

That priestly class must be defeated in the realm of ideas, and for all to see, if the Oz-like mystique of the State is to deliquesce. That means a combination of philosophy and action, a combination that I’ve found to be too rare. Rare in the sense that, almost every theoretician of liberty abstains from activism, and the activists abstain from theory.  There must be a fusion if there is to be success. I don’t consider myself much of an activist, or theoretician, but I am actively working to remedy both, applying equal emphasis. That involves discipline, and the development and utilization of daily systems.

I can’t imagine a greater goal, or greater endeavor, than the pursuit of liberty. It’s an intellectual pursuit foremost, but its realization in the present day should be kept always in mind. Not in some distant future, but now. The time for compromise is over, for voting for someone who might throw a bone or two to the liberty movement. It means living up to the legacy of the Ron Paul Revolution. It means dusting off the optimism and sense of limitlessness that we felt when we campaigned for him.

For me, the past year has felt like one that has been spent slowly climbing out of a dark well, one I’ve been stuck at the bottom of for five years. I was made to feel that I should be happy and content there, with every attempt to escape met with a deepening, and darkening of that well. I realized that there is nothing wrong with wanting my own freedom, and returning to my former passions, the ones I’d left at the entrance to the well. I’d found my old passions waiting patiently for me in the sunlight, along with several new faces, and one beautiful one in particular that has offered something much more than an Annie Wilkes-esque locked room.

And so this blog is a chronicle of one individual’s pursuit of liberty in the dual spheres of theory and action.  Theory must precede action, but I’ve focused far too much on theory. It’s only recently that I’ve realized how powerful action can be when focused like a laser in the pursuit of liberty. Marijuana in Oklahoma, can you believe it? It was the result of action, but of philosophically focused action, with the goal in relentless pursuit. Liza Greve’s vaccine choice group single-handedly unseated an incumbent state senator. This is philosophically-focused action, and it is the key to the path to liberty reborn. To a republic, reborn. The name of this blog implies that this republic can be born again, that the spirit of liberty that created it can be revived. But philosophically-focused and informed action is the only path. Let that be our lantern and goal to lead us out of the dark-as-night well and into liberty’s eternal sunlight.

The American Conservative: The Pentagon is building up its troop presence…in Norway

FEE: Seven things I’d do if I wanted to keep poor people poor

MAJ. DANNY SJURSEN: Dying for what?: A tour of fruitless American killing and sacrifice

GRACY OLMSTEAD: Our civic institutions are self-destructing

Truthdig: The contradictions of John McCain

PETER VAN BUREN: See ya, John

KEVIN WILLIAMSON: The exquisite sensibilities of the outrage industry

Scientific American: The paradox of Karl Popper Ed: Despite the tone of the article, it sounds like Popper was an exceedingly charming genius of a man.