Philosophy

Progressive Egalitarians Should Be Anti-IP

September 5, 2010 @ 11:35 pm

The Obama Administration insists that “‘Piracy is flat, unadulterated theft,’ and it should be dealt with accordingly.” Nonsense, of course. Only scarce goods can be property and therefore only scarce goods can be stolen. Ideas or information patterns are nonscarce goods. If I take your bicycle, you don’t have it anymore. If I copy your [...]

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Voting, Moral Hazard, and Like Buttons

September 1, 2010 @ 1:02 pm

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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CrunchGear vs. the Tea Party on Net Neutrality

August 13, 2010 @ 4:54 pm

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

August 12, 2010 @ 8:49 am

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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Mythbuster: Libertarianism and Unchosen Obligations

June 18, 2010 @ 2:30 pm

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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How to Mirror a Censored WordPress Blog

June 17, 2010 @ 8:51 pm

A couple of days ago David mentioned on The Libertarian Standard that the Mises Institute providing its entire online media and literature library as a set of free torrents can be seen as part of a distributed or grassroots intellectual guerrilla resistance against the state. This is just one aspect of the Mises Institute’s effort [...]

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If you don't like it, leave — for a price

May 28, 2010 @ 12:29 pm

A common retort that libertarians, even minarchists, hear when criticizing ‘their’ government is “If you don’t like it, then just leave.” Indeed, residency is perceived to be one piece of evidence (among others, like voting, paying taxes, etc.) for one’s implicit consent to the state and its rules. Just leave. As if there are better alternatives. [...]

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American vs. British SF, Revisited

May 1, 2010 @ 12:22 am

A while back I published a blogpost here about the individualist American strain of SF and the more cosmological perspective of the British strain. I just published and expanded and revised version at The Libertarian Standard, working in more explicit libertarian observations.

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