New York Times Columnist Hits the Nail on the Head

Thumbing through the NY Times, I stumbled across this article.

Perhaps the best defense of free trade and outsourcing I've heard in quite a while.

-kg*m/s

Dear Freedom Lovers

We're going to be having a Libertarian "party" tomorrow, Thursday the 17th at Super Taco at 6:30 to be followed by a screening of some sort of Liberty-minded documentary at a location to be determined (We know, we just don't want to tell everyone yet). We'll be talking about some ideas we have for the organization but it'll be very informal, so feel free to come for whatever political discussions come up. We'll also probably talk about having official meetings and where they'll be, but anything else that comes up you will definitely be hearing about here (and via email).

--
adam

South Carolina Still Thinks Personal Liberty is a Pretty Darn Good Thing

A Greenville law has come before the South Carolina Supreme Court that, if overturned, will give private property owners in South Carolina at least some of their rights back.

Charleston.net: High Court to Hear Smoking Ban Case

Most of the debate surrounding smoking bans in bars and restaraunts center around people who are smokers and people who are not smokers, and which rights should be allotted to which of those two groups. Often, the private business owners are left out! What rights do they have concerning which types of people they do business with?

To more socialistic states like Florida or New York, the answer is that private businesses only have the rights that the state government lets them have. This flies in the face of the ideals that this country was founded upon. Governments are instituted to protect liberty, not to protect health.

We can only hope that the South Carolina Supreme Court judge upholds personal liberty with regard for private business owners and that all smoking ban advocates move to a nanny state like New York that doesn't care as much for property rights.

-kg*m/s

Global Warming

John Tierney over at the New York Times has a great article on Global Warming - summing up my beliefs in a nutshell. Read it here.

A notable excerpt:

Slow warming doesn’t make for memorable images on television or in people’s minds, so activists, journalists and scientists have looked to hurricanes, wild fires and starving polar bears instead. They have used these images to start an “availability cascade,” a term coined by Timur Kuran, a professor of economics and law at the University of Southern California, and Cass R. Sunstein, a law professor at the University of Chicago.

The availability cascade is a self-perpetuating process: the more attention a danger gets, the more worried people become, leading to more news coverage and more fear. Once the images of Sept. 11 made terrorism seem a major threat, the press and the police lavished attention on potential new attacks and supposed plots. After Three Mile Island and “The China Syndrome,” minor malfunctions at nuclear power plants suddenly became newsworthy.

The only people who really don't believe in Global Warming are those who have no scientific reasoning skills. The problem, rather, is with the fear-mongering Al Gore technique. Many politicians, as a result, will use the Global Warming scare to gain more power and regulate more aspects of our life.

What's really unfortunate through this whole deal is how much good hasn't been done because of Government intervention. Look at ethanol. It's expensive, it's not profitable, and it's making food prices rise. Want to see a real reversal of a climate degradation? Let the market decide.

--
adam