The IRS Makes a Star Trek Parody

The result? Exactly what you’d expect. Nick Gillespie at Reason excoriates the waste of taxpayer money. As for me, I’d rather see tax money going here—where we can all get a laugh at the IRS’s expense—than see it spent on bombs or drones.

A Little Supreme Court Skepticism?

Today, my Facebook feed is all gay marriage, all the time. But while college kids sanctify their progressiveness by uploading pictures of equal signs, it looks like the Supreme Court is treating the issue with a little more skepticism. Justice Alito (“the Burkean justice“) asks, “You want us to step in and render a decision based on …

Northerners Against the Civil War

As a libertarian from Massachusetts—an opponent of aggressive war and a supporter of peaceful secession—I take a kind of ambivalent view of my state’s history. I certainly support the South’s right to secede from the Union and condemn the brutality that northern troops inflicted . . . but it’s still hard to side with people who …

Libertarian Blind Spots on Gay Marriage

Some spokesmen for a group called “Young Conservatives for the Freedom to Marry” have an op-ed in The Daily Caller making the libertarian case for gay marriage. They write: As conservatives and libertarians, the three of us believe that we’d all be better served if government extricated itself from the business of marriage altogether, leaving it …

Nullification Comes to Cornell

I’ve written an article for the Cornell Daily Sun‘s law student column, defending state nullification. I argue that the people of the states—and not the Supreme Court—must to be the final decider of federal law. This is quite the minority position in law school, which, for various reasons, teaches everyone to think of federal litigation as …

Rand Paul on Lochner

During the middle of his epic filibuster last week, Rand Paul made a very unexpected reference to the 1905 Supreme Court case, Lochner v. New York. (Randy Barnett has the full transcript here.) Lochner is a case that all law students are taught to hate. It involved a New York law that limited the amount of …

The Enigma of Rand Paul

Ben hopes that Rand Paul’s filibuster yesterday can turn civil liberties and checks and balances into bipartisan issues. I hope so too—and I think there’s some reason for hope—but I’m still extremely skeptical. While lots of people are “standing with Rand,” the support isn’t nearly as universal as one might hope. Among liberals, the MSNBC …

Donald Livingston at the South Carolina State House

My college honors thesis advisor, Donald Livingston, recently testified at the South Carolina House Judiciary Subcommittee in favor of state nullification. Tom Woods has the full text of his remarks. Dr. Livingston is a brilliant paleo-libertarian philosopher who first got me to realize that decentralism and freedom go together. In college, I profiled him for …

A Conservatism the Cool Kids Will Like

Being a conservative academic can be tough and thankless. On college campuses, all the accolades will go to the Left. When you apply for teaching positions, you have to hide your own convictions just to get the job. If you do get the job (remember that F.A. Hayek won the Nobel Prize but couldn’t get …

The Immortal Murray Rothbard

Murray Rothbard would have been 87 tomorrow. He has been dead for 18 years, and yet he is more popular and more widely-read now than he ever was in life, especially among the young. Paul Lyons, a radically leftist historian who chronicled his experience teaching a class on American conservatism, had this to say about …

Human Rights: True and False

At the American Conservative, Paul Gottfried takes on “human rights” talk. He writes: I am arguing against the use of human rights bombast whenever some individual, institution, or state wishes to express a political preference or a program of social reconstruction. Just make your arguments and let the listener decide. Further, I don’t object to listening …

The Sip that Rocked the World

I didn’t watch the State of the Union last night. When I’m in the mood to watch a show about nothing, I just watch reruns of Seinfeld. But apparently a lot of people did watch it, because, when I logged into Facebook today, everyone was abuzz. Abuzz about what? The president’s escalation of deadly drone strikes? …

Ron Paul and The “Virtue” of Compromise

Our newest blogger, Radagast, begins his commentary at Beyond the GOP with a criticism of Ron Paul. He brings up an important point when he writes:  [Ron Paul] is neither an ideologue nor a narcissist . . . but his uncompromising commitment to his principles is politically objectionable in my view. . . The “games” of …

Re: Nullification is Popular

Ben writes that nullification is popular. As well it should be. But while nullification becomes more popular among the masses, it is increasingly mocked and disparaged by the elites—though not always persuasively. The nullification scholar Tom Woods noted this recently on his blog, opining, “[A]s the MSM starts to address nullification, it’s looking like nothing but …

Tom Tancredo Passes the Blunt

Tom Tancredo promised to publicly smoke pot if Colorado’s legalization initiative passed. But now, after the initiative did indeed pass, he’s backing out, supposedly because his wife and grandkids were so outraged.  All of which brings up the question: why do Tancredo’s wife and grandkids care if he smokes pot? More to the point: why …

NAACP, Soda Bans, and the Confusion of Rod Dreher

Rod Dreher opposes Mayor Bloomberg’s New York soda ban. But, in a post at the American Conservative, Dreher is outraged that the NAACP thinks of the ban as a “civil rights issue.” That is, the NAACP points out that the ban would disparately harm minority convenience-store owners—and to Dreher, this makes them “prostitutes” in the pocket …

Robert Nisbet on Abortion

The forty-year anniversary of Roe v. Wade was on Tuesday. With all the cliched left-right posturing that the abortion controversy engendered, it is instructive to read the great conservative sociologist Robert Nisbet’s thoughts on the subject. Nisbet was one of the leading conservative intellectuals of the last century and most famously argued that the decline of …

In Defense of the Libertines

Lots of people, including people on this blog, distinguish between “libertarianism” and “libertinism.” The former, they say, can be okay, as long as it is undergirded by conservative principles. The latter, however, is almost always denounced. So it was a refreshing change of pace when I came across this interview with Thaddeus Russell, a libertarianish …

The NRA Was Right About Obama

The NRA’s new ad about Obama’s children has been getting a lot of attention. Unfortunately, most of the criticism—e.g., on whether it is good form to talk about the president’s children or whether it is in fact true that Sasha and Malia’s school employs armed guards—misses the important point. That is: whether we’re turning into …

. . . Then Why Be Conservative?

In his defense of conservatism and radical change (below), Edmund Babbitt writes: [C]onservatism is cautious about attempts to reform political society and generally favors limited and incremental rather than drastic and immediate change. . .  Nevertheless, conservatives recognize that uneasiness about change does not translate into adamant and unqualified opposition to all attempts at improvement—even …

Ted Cruz’s Neoconservative Boilerplate

When Ted Cruz ran for the Senate, he got the endorsements of Ron and Rand Paul and the Paul-inspired Young Americans for Liberty. Compared to Ron Paul, Secretary of Defense nominee Chuck Hagel’s foreign policy is a pretty boring, if sensible enough, centrism. But now, in a USA Today op-ed, Senator Cruz denounces Hagel’s foreign policy …

The Perils of Top-Down Reform

Being both a law student and a libertarian, I often wonder what I can do to advance libertarian ideals once I start practicing law. And, broadly, I see two basic methods for libertarian legal reform. The first is the “top down” approach of Randy Barnett and the Institute for Justice, which tries to persuade judges …

5 Arguments We Should Abandon in 2013 (But Probably Won’t)

2012 was a good year for bad arguments. Here’s a list of the five worst arguments of 2012, and what is wrong with them. 1.  Obama won the election fair and square, so now we should let him carry out his mandate. Most people agree that politics should be about pursuing policies that are likely …

America’s Dwindling Crime Problem

The American Conservative just published an anti-gun article by Zach Beauchamp of Think Progress (!). Throughout the article, Beauchamp keeps repeating the figure of “32,000 deaths from gun violence per year.” I guess this is supposed to shock the reader—it certainly seems like a big number. But it would be nice to know how this number …

Toward the Denationalization of Conversations

Of all the silly abstractions that politicians conjure up, I think that the idea of a “national conversation” is one of the worst. Nations cannot converse; only individual people can. And in the society that we live in, the individual people who will have the media access to lead a national conversation are not the …