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Libertarian Night Before Christmas

By Adam Tobias Magoon (twas posted on his Facebook page 7 years ago and he does not recall if he originated this or found it; either way it’s funny and IP is forced negative servitude)

Twas the night before Christmas, and all over the net

Libertarian infighting, as good as it gets.

The young cats and rookies, the intellectual debtors

watch left and right scrum over racist news letters.  
Should anarchists vote? Or is it a crock?

‘Wendy’s a statist!’ Exclaimed Walter Block.

Anarchists, minarchists, a matter of degrees?

You min-mins are fascists! Awaiting kings decrees!  
Atheist, Christian, Muslim or Jew

We don’t fight over faith, like statists do.

We prefer to fight over who should be ruling.

And private vs public vs un-or-homeschooling.  
Taxation is theft, and all war is murder.

Further consensus? Good luck, cat herder.

Even semantics are points for a schism,

Call it free-markets, or capitalism?  
Austria or Chicago? Friedman or Mises?

Is Peikoff the pope, if Ayn Rand is Jesus?

Konkin or Rothbard? What’s on your shelves?

Ah hell, what’s the difference, Ron Paul twenty-twelve!  
So on Hayek and Murray, on Ron and on Ayn.

On Ludwig and Milton! on Bastiat and Heinlein.

Let’s call a truce, friends, for just this one night.

Then on the 26th… libertarians…. FIGHT!

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Understanding Time-Preference vs Being Homophobic

Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s battle with the PC gate keepers

By Anarcho-Viking

Trouble with the thought police

In 2004 during a lecture on money and banking, at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Prof. Hans-Hermann Hoppe provided an example of how the concept of time-preference plays a major role in the economy, local as well as global. The illustration given by Prof. Hoppe became a national controversy, and was used by the left-wing opinion molders in an attempt to hound the Austro-anarcho-capitalist academic out of polite society, and to consequently destroy his career. The case presented by Hoppe, and that caused the outcry, was hardly controversial at all. We will get to the actual case soon, but let us first clarify what the definition of time-preference is, and why it is such an important component as part of economic analysis.

Time-preference and the Austrian school

The level of time-preference an individual has, is measured by the degree to which that individual is willing to postpone present consumption in favor of the future, delayed gratification of greater benefits than what consumption right away would provide. A trivial, yet classic example of degree of time-preference, can be seen in the experiment of giving a child the following option: Either receiving one cookie right now, or waiting 30 minutes and receiving two cookies. The child’s present desire to consume usually trumps the willingness to await delayed gratification, and hence we conclude through praxeological deduction that children on average have a higher degree of time-preference than more mentally mature persons. The price paid by giving up present consumption in exchange for future value of a good or service must mean that the expected future psychic revenue is greater than the present psychic revenue generated by consuming instantaneously. Nobody would prefer to consume later should the act of consuming generate the same satisfaction today as it would a year from now. Continue reading “Understanding Time-Preference vs Being Homophobic”

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USE YOUR WORDS

How Political Violence Makes Us All Slaves

By Hinton Bowers

Slavery was always a hotly contested and controversial issue going back to the founding of the US republic. It’s detractors claiming, rightly, that it denies not just life, or liberty, or the pursuit of happiness, but all three.

These tensions eventually helped lead to the outbreak of state violence known as the American Civil War, but it was arguably precipitated by a very personal event in the spring of 1856…

Out-spoken abolitionist Charles Sumner, a senator from Massachusetts, had changed his party several times over the issue of slavery. Though abolitionists were generally disliked by the public ‘at large’ for inflaming tensions between the north and the south; on this day,  and perhaps unwittingly, Sumner instigated once again for personal liberty. By giving his famous CRIME AGAINST KANSAS speech, he was attempting to block the state-sanctioned expansion of slavery into that territory. Sumner’s speeches were usually fiery and this one was no exception, but then Sumner said something a little different:

“The senator from South Carolina has read many books of chivalry, and believes himself a chivalrous knight with sentiments of honor and courage. Of course he has chosen a mistress — who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; — I mean the harlot, slavery.”

Targeting a sponsor of the Kansas pro-slavery bill, Sumner went personal, attacking Andrew Butler, accusing him of both delusion and sexual deviance, this ‘ruffled the feathers’ of many, but as history would record, it was Butlers’ cousin who would take it the most personally… Continue reading “USE YOUR WORDS”