Washington Post: “A government of the people’s every wish?”

If you don’t live in this country all of the time, and I don’t, here is what you notice when you come home: Americans — with their lawsuit culture, their safety obsession and, above all, their addiction to government spending programs — demand more from their government than just about anybody else in the world. They don’t simply want the government to keep the peace and create a level playing field. They want the government to ensure that every accident and every piece of bad luck is prevented, or that they are fully compensated in the event something goes wrong. And if the price of their house drops, they will hold the government responsible for that, too.

The Francisco Marroquin University in Guatemala, which is a real world leader in online education and media, has just released the full Hayek interviews organized by Armen Alchian of UCLA after Hayek’s Nobel Prize in 1974. The interviews are searchable and you can quickly and easily jump from place to place. Congratulations to UFM for this achievement. (And I’m pleased that I had recommended for an academic internship at UFM this last year one of the people who worked on it, Alex Weller of Penn State.)

My opening remarks (limited to no more than 5 minutes!) on the case against the state at FreedomFest: The Case for Ordered Liberty Without States

Just got in to my hotel in Tokyo. Very exhausted after the FreedomFest and then the travel!

I’m off to Las Vegas for meetings, for FreedomFest, where I’ll debate on the question of “Anarchy vs. Limited Government” and sign copies of Realizing Freedom: Libertarian Theory, History, and Practice for Laissez Faire Books (which has the lowest price, in case you haven’t bought a copy!), and then head off to Japan, Philippines, China (for meetings and a conference on “Austrian economics” in China), San Diego (for Cato University!), Athens, and Crete. Maybe I’ll see you along the way!

My interview on Fox Business while here in Berlin. (It’s a part of a whole program on Milton Friedman’s legacy.)

David Bernstein on the rather, um, selective history of “Progressivism” given by the “Center for American Progress”: “Whitewashing Progressivism”

One could add many, many sins to the account of so-called “Progressives,” including prohibition, victimless crime laws generally, vice squads, public morals legislation, and generally attempting to replace the rule of law by the rule of wise and moral “experts,” i.e., themselves.

Reason.com: “Up from Slavery: There’s no such thing as a golden age of lost liberty”

I am particularly struck by libertarians and conservatives who celebrate the freedom of early America, and deplore our decline from those halcyon days, without bothering to mention the existence of slavery. Take R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., longtime editor of the American Spectator. In Policy Review (Summer 1987, not online), he wrote:

Let us flee to a favored utopia. For me that would be the late 18th Century but with air conditioning….With both feet firmly planted on the soil of my American domain, and young American flag fluttering above, tobacco in the field, I would relish the freedom.

I take it Mr. Tyrrell dreams of being a slave-owner. Because as he certainly knows, most of the people in those tobacco fields were slaves.

Steve Davies in a lecture at the Mercatus Center

My appreciation of Hayek on the occasion of his 100th Birthday (May 8, 1999): “F. A. Hayek: Prophet of the Modern World”

I recall being at a birthday party for the great man in Vienna at the Handelskammer in, I think, 1988 or 1989, when Karl Milford, the grandson of the Austrian-Marxist Rudolf Hilferding, spoke. It was at that party that I met a wonderful Czech libertarian, Miroslav Sevcik, with whom I worked to promote liberty in Czechoslovakia when I was promoting liberty in the Soviet Bloc nations.

Ten years ago I wrote for Slate the truth about what our federal census has become: “Census 2000: You May Already Be a Winner!”

(Note: Some of the links — ten years on — don’t work, but you could have learned how to say “The money will be distributed by national and local authorities,” among other fascinating things, in Hmong, Polish, and Laotian.)

My latest contribution on Cato Unbound: “LIBERAL REPUBLICANISM, MOVING PICTURES, AND WHY FREEDOM ISN’T THE SAME AS GOODNESS”

I deal with the illiberal theory of “republicanism” advanced by Prof. Philip Pettit of Princeton, the dismissal of free markets by Prof. John Christman of Pennsylvania State University, and the treatment of freedom by Prof. Jason Brennan of Brown University.

Cato Unbound is hosting a debate that is going to start hotting up tomorrow. David Schmidtz and Jason Brennan started with an excerpt from their new book A Brief History of Liberty: “Conceptions of Freedom.” I offered my criticism (I admire both Schmidtz and Brennan, but I strongly disagreed), “Liberty is Liberty.” Then “republican” theorist Philip Pettit, author of Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government, offered his critique, “On the Promotion of Liberty,” followed by John Christman, author of The Myth of Property: Toward an Egalitarian Theory of Ownership, responded in “Out of the Armchair, into Indeterminacy.”

Tomorrow David and Jason will respond and then we’ll debate the issues back and forth. I’ve read Schmidtz’s and Brennans’ book and Christman’s book and am nearly done with Pettit’s, and I’ve got lots to say. Watch this space….

My response (“Liberty is Liberty“) to the provocative essay (“Conceptions of Freedom“) by David Schmidtz and Jason Brennan is now online.

I’m mostly through their very interesting (not in the British sense of the word, but the American sense) book A Brief History of Liberty. I disagree robustly with the thesis of the essay in Cato Unbound (which is drawn from the introduction to A Brief History of Liberty), which does not stop me from enjoying thoroughly their book.

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.

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.

The Colombian Constitutional Court has put a stop to the principle of “President for Life” (BBC: “Colombian judges deny Alvaro Uribe third term poll“)

A Power Failure for Chavez (BBC: “Lights failure throws Chavez into darkness“)

I discussed the topic of sustainable democracy in the 2009 Julian L. Simon Memorial Lecture in New Delhi, “Democracy and Limited Government: The Unbreakable Partnership”

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.)

Yours truly in today’s Washington Post: “Plaintiff in handgun case is suing D.C. for right carry firearms in public”

It was a good chance to head out to the shooting range in Virginia!

Some find this a difficult topic to discuss, but it’s going to happen to all of us (well, probably), so it’s childish to avoid it. Yes, I’m discussing death. Jamie Dettmer, a friend and former colleague, has had to deal with this, as have I. His thoughts on the topic, drawing on his experience with his mother, can be found here: “The Gilderdale Case: The Right To Die”