Nick Hogan is free….but we want him not only to be free from jail, but a free man, without fear of idiotic “laws” dictating whether people may smoke in his pub. And without having to pay ransom to the state for his freedom.

Bravo!!!!! I am so pleased by this. Congratulations to Mr. Hogan and to Old Holborn.

The new Cato Unbound is focused on the nature of liberty. The lead essay (“The Big Myth About Liberty“) by David Schmidtz and Jason Brennan is quite provocative. My response essay will run on Friday, followed by the responses from John Christman and Philip Pettit, and then a discussion among all of us. I hope to learn from the discussion.

ISFLC Introduction Video from Students For Liberty on Vimeo.

I’ve donated. Have you? Students for Liberty. Young Americans for Liberty.

The paper at Wabash College interviewed me to the famous Goodrich Room at the college before a very nice dinner with students and my lecture, which was sponsored by the Wabash Conservative Union. I had agreed to speak on the condition that I get a guided tour of the Goodrich Room, which was endowed and designed by Pierre F. Goodrich, the founder of the Liberty Fund.

The resulting interview is a reasonably clear statement of my beliefs (but with a few tiny errors and bits of awkward phrasing that are hard to avoid when talking into a mike!): “LIBERTY UNBOUND: AN INTERVIEW WITH DR. TOM PALMER”

(Among the errors, note my confused comment that “I don’t know if James Madison ever read Gilgamesh,” which is certainly unlikely, as the text was not rediscovered until the mid 19th century.)

I’ll be in Montreal, PQ this weekend to speak at a seminar on Politics & Society at McGill University. It’s being organized by the Institute for Liberal Studies, which is a really first rate group. I spoke in 2008 (quite by accident!) at one of their conferences in Toronto. I was in town for another conference and blogged about it, only to be informed that ILS was holding a conference across town. I raced over during an afternoon break to see the conference and was invited to give a quick talk. It was a hoot.

Three Women Who Launched a Movement

The Afghanistan Economic and Legal Studies Organization with which I work has just published their first book, a Dari edition of Common Sense Economics: What Everyone Should Know About Wealth and Prosperity, by James Gwartney, Richard Stroup, and Dwight Lee.

I just found (thanks to snooping around some emails) the text of the Julian L. Simon Memoral Lecture I gave in 2009 in New Delhi on “Democracy and Limited Government: The Unbreakable Partnership.” For those who are interested, some years earlier I wrote essays on “Challenges of Democratization,” “The Role of Institutions and Law in Economic Development,” and other essays on the central role of institutions in the development and enjoyment of liberty that are included in Realizing Freedom: Libertarian Theory, History, and Practice.

I just stumbled upon Gary Johnson’s website, via his Facebook page. The updates are pretty good.

If you’re a student and would like to understand better just what is happening today, as government expands in all directions, and what you can do about it, apply for a Bastiat Scholarship to attend Cato University 2010.

Thanks to the good work of Pierre Garello and Philippe Maitre, a great journal lives again. (Click on the image to the left for more details.)

Are you going? You should think about Cato University July 25-30 and FreedomFest July 8-10. (I’ll be speaking at both.)

UPDATE: I forgot to mention that Bastiat Scholarships are available to qualified students. Get in your applications now!

“Libertarian” Playboy Mag Hates Choice, Loves Authentic Communism by Michael C. Moynihan includes, as a bonus, Moynihan’s interview with Gorki Aguila of the Cuban band Porno Para Ricardo.

According to those who attended, the booing of Alexander was from Mr. Sorba, the second speaker.

From Ed Kilgore of The New Republic: “It’s You, Not Me:
Liberals and libertarians finally break up.”

An interesting question is, “Does loudly professing concern for the poor translate into actually benefiting them?” (It’s a topic I address in a paper forthcoming in a volume from Cambridge University Press edited by Peter Hoffenberg and William Galston.)

Hat Tip to Michael Cannon

For standing up against bigotry: “SFL Causes CPAC Controversy” and “SFL Controversy Video”

ISFLC Introduction Video from Students For Liberty on Vimeo.

The Sunday “Credo” interview in today’s Washington Examiner: “Credo: Tom Palmer”

At your core, what is one of your defining beliefs?
I believe that the individual human life matters. I believe that human freedom is a constituent element of a good life — of human happiness — and is, consequently, intrinsically valuable.

(Since I’m reading rather carefully Ian Carter’s excellent A Measure of Freedom, I might have substituted for “intrinsically valuable” the term “non-specifically and constitutively valuable,” but that would probably not have conveyed my point any more clearly.)

Leonard Liggio

The FAZ, one of the most influential newspapers in Europe, reviewed my book Realizing Freedom and Detmar Doering’s very good Traktat über die Freiheit. The reviewer, Professor Michael Zöller, is Professor of Political Sociology at the University of Bayreuth. In the review, which is favorable to both books, he refers to my essay “Twenty Myths About Markets” (in Realizing Freedom) as a “Vademecum [Handbook] for dragon slayers.” He cites approvingly both my and Doering’s attempts to provide a coherent account of liberty that does not load it down with qualifiers; Doering notes that many contemporary formulations of freedom suggest that freedom of movement requires, for its proper enjoyment, not merely the absence of human hindrances to movement, but a Ferrari, and my essay “Freedom Properly Understood” in Realizing Freedom takes aim at such views, including Amartya Sen’s, which seeks to redefine freedom as “the expansion of the ‘capabilities’ of persons to lead the kind of lives they value – and have reason to value,” which I point out requires us to justify our choices to others, rather than simply having the right to make them. Zöller writes,

“In his other essays, Palmer bursts one intellectual balloon after another, be it the common opposition between the state as oriented to the common good vs. society as the expression of self-interest, or the theory of justice of John Rawls, the most influential attempt to expand the definition of freedom. Palmer picks to pieces the so-called Difference Principle, which Rawls used in putting both individual freedom and the equal distribution of opportunities and goods in one and the same social contract.”

I update and comment on matters on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/RealizingFreedom