John Jackson
Because the world does not obey their ideology, libertarians prefer to send us to fictional places where their ideas actually work. Libertarians love making stuff up. I don’t mean the counterfactual stories they tell when you point out some wonderful thing the government has supplied such as...
John Jackson
I love a good heist story. You know the ones, our heroes are planning a seemingly impossible task. They are the good guys, forced to operate outside the law for unjust reasons. The team is always composed of specialists: you have the getaway driver, you have the cat burgler, you have the muscle,...
John Jackson
Previous readers of this content may recall my main argument: the libertarian “freedom movement” failed to address racism in the post-World War II United States and often used libertarian arguments to hinder progress for African Americans. However, after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting...
John Jackson
According to the American Economic Association: Economics can be defined in a few different ways. It’s the study of scarcity, the study of how people use resources and respond to incentives, or the study of decision-making. It often involves topics like wealth and finance, but it’s not all...
John Jackson
It turns out I have more thoughts on Andrew Koppelman’s new book, Burning Down the House. In my previous post, I dealt with Hayek and racism. Here I focus on Koppeman’s claim that a sharp distinction can be drawn between the crude and radical libertarianism of Murray Rothbard and the sophisticated...
John Jackson
In his new book, Burning Down the House: How Libertarian Philosophy was Corrupted by Delusion and Greed, Andrew Koppelman, the John Paul Stevens Professor of Law at Northwestern University attempts to rescue libertarianism from itself by centering the work of Freidrich A. Hayek, one of the most...
John Jackson
Some religious traditions, most famously, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, practice the Baptism of the Dead. In this practice, the Church baptizes a living person who is acting as a proxy for a deceased person in order to ensure that that deceased person gains entry into Heaven....