The Failure You Know

This was originally posted at Neighborhood Effects. Better the devil you know, than the devil you don’t. - Traditional idiom Sayings become traditional if they contain sufficient truth, but truth can usually be graded on a scale, from absolute to non-existent; better writers have called this the “truth-of-the-head” and the “truth-of-the-heart.” The truth-of-the-head is that American public [...]

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Washing My Hands

Can you renounce your state citizenship?

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Bush, The Wall and Dragos

Paul Hollander writes an excellent piece in the Washington Post about the momentous events of November 1989.  Hollander escaped the communist hegemony in 1956, and he writes about the oppression and murder committed by the statist regimes of the last century. While greatly concerned with communism in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Americans — [...]

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Maine and TABOR

I’m officially blogging at the Mercatus Center’s Neighborhood Effects blog.  My first post is about Maine’s TABOR bill.  At this point, it seems unlikely to pass, although I’ve crossed my fingers and sent in my absentee ballot.

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3G Health Care

Peter Suderman does an excellent job of clarifying Ezra Klein’s misconceptions about health care. This is the house they’ve built: an insurance market where plans are written for the healthy and all legal efforts are made to exclude the sick. That’s meant premiums are somewhat lower than they’d otherwise be, but only because the people [...]

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The Associative State?

Just a random thought this morning: history has progressed to this point, and seen several revolutions in the formal arrangements that govern societies. Since pre-history, people lived in chaotic tribal groups, often warring with their neighbors.  Power and leadership coalesced around the warlord.  Eventually warlords ceded some power to a King, who could ensure a [...]

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Reader Questions vol I: Patents and Innovation

Frequent contributor (and my brother-from-another-mother) Tom suggests we add an “ask a libertarian” section.  Now we are hardly mouthpieces for a wildly diverse movement that is part party, part philosophy, and we won’t try to be. But we’re certainly glad to engage readers and try to shine some light on why we think freedom, limited [...]

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