Heritage Foundation: Drop those Independent Thoughts, Citizen
The Heritage Foundation, as usual, is trying to rein in all non-establishment thinking, which is popping up all over the place these days. Its New Year’s Resolutions for Conservatives basically amount to this: if you still have any conservative instincts left, drop them and become a neoconservative already. Of course you should not consider nullification, [...]
Who Was the Least Bad U.S. President?
Martin van Buren. Jeff Hummel makes the case in a paper delivered at a conference I attended and spoke at myself 1998, while still a lad. Here’s Murray Rothbard making the case for van Buren about a decade earlier, with the important caveat that he was unlibertarian on the Indian question.
Nullification Movie Needs Your Help
Here’s the second promo for the upcoming nullification documentary. The project needs your help. Will you lend a hand?
For the Feds, Speech is Speech. Unless you’re advocating Jury Nullification
Retired chemistry professor Julian Heicklen is facing imprisonment for advocating jury nullification to passersby, following an indictment by federal prosecutors last year, according to the New York Times. He stood on a plaza outside the United States Courthouse in Manhattan and handed out brochures on the subject. According to prosecutors, Heicklen’s “advocacy of jury nullification, directed as it [...]
Tea Party: Cut Insane Deficits. Bring Back Crazy Deficits!
Herman Cain won a straw poll of Missouri Tea Party members last week. Ron Paul came in second, and Newt Gingrich third, with no other candidate even close. If you read this blog regularly, nothing here will come as a surprise to you. But I am still trying to understand what principles the Tea Party espouses. Constitutionalism? [...]
Is (Iowa Conservative) Bob Vander Plaats for World Government?
The social conservative leader has ruled out Ron Paul for his organization’s endorsement because Paul believes in “states’ rights” across the board — rather an odd view for a Christian group to take. Christians, from Calvinists to Catholics, are supposed to believe in subsidiarity, an ancient principle of Christian social thought, whereby power is to be as [...]
Shock: Guilds Enriched Powerful, Harmed Society
I have interacted with quite a few opponents of the free market, both socialists and “traditionalists,” who have looked to the medieval guilds as a great example of how society can be organized without the alleged dog-eat-dog competition of the market. Under the guilds, competition was held in check. This means everyone was allowed to [...]
Finally, a Conservative Who Isn’t Naive on Foreign Policy
Andrew Bacevich, in his new book Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War, takes apart the saccharine platitudes of the bipartisan foreign-policy consensus, ideas one is considered “crazy” or a “kook” for challenging, and finds that it is these platitudes themselves that are crazy, ahistorical, without foundation, etc. Bacevich, a contributing editor of The American Conservative, considers [...]
‘Repeal’ of Glass-Steagall Irrelevant to Financial Crisis
Although we’ve heard a great deal about how “deregulation” caused the financial crisis, specific cases of repealed legislation that would have prevented it are few and far between. The one some progressives seem to have settled on is the “repeal” of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which separated commercial from investment banking. The “repeal” involved [...]
Speaking Off the Cuff
You may recognize some familiar themes here, but I didn’t plan out my speech to the Libertarians of Northeast Kansas. I think it came out all right.
Silver Circle Trailer
The folks making the Silver Circle movie, which deals with life after a major economic collapse, have released a one-minute trailer:
ONE WEEK Before Collapse, Cain Says Economy Great
Amazingly, Herman Cain’s star continues to rise, which means Republicans think it’s all right for someone to endorse Mitt Romney, as Cain did, to support TARP (it’s not his fault, say supporters — he somehow had no idea it would be used to “pick winners and losers”!), and to be completely clueless about the condition [...]
Charity, Health Care, and the Free Market
NOTE: Tom Woods will be a featured speaker at Nullify Now! Jacksonville. Get tickets here – http://www.nullifynow.com/jacksonville/ – or by calling 888-71-TICKETS ******* When Ron Paul suggested in a Republican debate that the charitable efforts of a free people were the answer to those who needed medical care and were genuinely unable to pay, critics [...]
Is Ron Paul Wrong on Money and the Constitution?
NOTE: Tom Woods will be a featured speaker at Nullify Now! Jacksonville. Get tickets here – http://www.nullifynow.com/jacksonville/ – or by calling 888-71-TICKETS ******* My latest video. I got a lot of requests for this one. Incidentally, I realized after uploading it that I had twice said “grams” of silver when of course I meant grains. [...]
AmSpec Writer, Smashed, Comes Back for More
I understand Jeffrey Lord has another attack on Ron Paul (and me) over at the American Spectator. Naturally this happens when I am about to catch a plane and head to New York for three days of events. I guess he is upset that some people have criticized Reagan. Reagan is evidently the Obama of [...]
Nullification as a Gateway Drug
Some familiar themes here, but I am emphasizing that the most significant thing about state nullification, about which I have written a book, is that the very discussion of it involves straying from the ideological concentration camps in which our political and media establishments would confine us. We need to stray from those camps at every [...]
Life in the USSA
It has been fascinating and creepy to watch the state media try to drill a particular version of reality into our heads over the past few days. Here’s Jon Stewart in an absolutely hysterical takedown of that media. You’ve probably seen this around but may not have clicked on it. CLICK ON IT. You won’t [...]
Why I Changed My Mind
At “An Evening with Tom Woods,” an event at this year’s Mises University program, I talked about how I went from being a boring, middle-of-the-road GOP guy to a defender of a free and humane society. The students seemed to like it. Tom Woods will be a featured speaker at Nullify Now! Kansas City. Get [...]
Entrepreneur of Ideas
Lew Rockwell graciously permitted me to interview him on his own podcast, The Lew Rockwell Show, several days ago. Lew, as Robert Wenzel notes, is one of the great entrepreneurs of libertarian ideas. Here we talk about all kinds of things: how he first became interested in these ideas, his work on the Goldwater campaign, [...]
No Phony Gold Standards
Tom Woods will be a featured speaker at Nullify Now! Kansas City. Get tickets here – http://www.nullifynow.com/kansascity/ – or by calling 888-71-TICKETS When you hear talk about returning to the “gold standard,” be sure you know what the speaker means by the term. There are plenty of phony gold standards out there. The supply-sider/neocon version, [...]
Progressive Half Gets It
Adam Serwer at the American Prospect writes: Recently, Cato’s C. Bradley Thompson wrote about neoconservatism, saying that neoconservatives “are and always have been, by contrast, defenders of the post–New Deal welfare state.” Other than David Frum, I’m not aware of too many conservatives who have offered forceful defenses of the New Deal welfare state. Rather, as [...]
There Is More to Life than Elephants and Jackasses
This article is example #8,933 of the importance of Jack Hunter as an Old Right, non-neocon writer and speaker. Jack discusses his meeting with Kirkpatrick Sale, the radical decentralist who had enough principle to have his name removed from the masthead of The Nation when that magazine began drooling over Obama. Sale, whom I have also met, [...]
Want to Understand the World? Read These Books
Here’s my short list of books I would recommend to someone who is interested in the ideas on this site and wants to learn more. If you read and absorb these books you will never look at the world the same way again. If you’re like me, you are annoyed by books that teach you [...]
The Great American Political Spectrum. All 2.7 Inches
Noam Chomsky correctly observes, “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum — even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the [...]
