rights

Voting, Moral Hazard, and Like Buttons

by Geoffrey Allan Plauché September 1, 2010

I was reading Sarah Lacy’s “If You’ve Got Social Media Fatigue, UR DOIN IT WRONG” on TechCrunch and was reminded of a passage from Henry David Thoreau’s seminal essay “Civil Disobedience” that I discuss in chapter 6 of my dissertation. First the passage from Lacy’s article: Sometimes metrics can be a bad thing and beware of [...]

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A Pastor’s Provocative Attack on Islam

by Robert Wicks August 26, 2010

The New York Times is reporting the story of  Terry Jones’ plan to commemorate the 9/11 attacks by burning 50 Qur’ans. While I find his actions repulsive, and needlessly offensive to me and every other Muslim, irrespective of our political views, I must say that he nonetheless has every right to burn his own property [...]

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The “Ground Zero Mosque” and the Prospects for Liberty

by Jacob Huebert August 19, 2010

The furor over the “Ground Zero Mosque” (which is neither a mosque nor at Ground Zero) doesn’t make me very optimistic about the prospects for liberty. As a libertarian and just a live-and-let-live kind of guy, I can’t imagine caring much about, let alone vocally protesting, what someone is building two blocks away from me. [...]

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CrunchGear vs. the Tea Party on Net Neutrality

by Geoffrey Allan Plauché August 13, 2010

Yesterday, in All Your Tubes Are Belong to Googlizon, I blogged about the Google-Verizon proposal for regulating the internet and why libertarians should oppose both it and any net neutrality laws and regulations. Today, I came across a post on CrunchGear, a tech and gadgets site, by Nicholas Deleon, that criticizes the Tea Party for [...]

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All Your Tubes Are Belong to Googlizon

by Geoffrey Allan Plauché August 12, 2010

What you say!!! There has been a lot wailing and gnashing of teeth recently over a joint announcement by Google and Verizon of a legislative-framework proposal they’ve been working on. Now, I’ve seen this variously referred to as a backroom deal or pact, a secret treaty, or a set of regulations Google and Verizon are [...]

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What Kagan Should Have Said About Natural Rights

by Stephan Kinsella July 2, 2010

As noted in this Reason article, Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan was questioned by a Senator about whether she believes in natural rights that are not provided in the Constitution. She repeatedly refused to grant this, instead insisting: “I don’t have a view of what are natural rights, independent of the Constitution. And my job [...]

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Mythbuster: Libertarianism and Unchosen Obligations

by Geoffrey Allan Plauché June 18, 2010

It is a common mistake, made even by some libertarians and former libertarians, that libertarians reject the idea of unchosen obligations. Gene Callahan, apparently a former libertarian turned communitarian, is the latest to make this mistake. He says: Obligation . . . is the crucial idea denied by libertarian political theory. Well, this is just [...]

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