America on Trial: Socrates, Obama, and Why They Are Opposites

“This is How These Soldiers Were Trained to Act”

Here's a great interview from an Iraq Veterans Against the War member, Josh Stieber. Josh discusses the Wikileaks video of the Apache Helicopter killing civilians and two Reuters employees. He takes the position that you're missing the point if you just simply think these soldiers were inhumane and evil. He argues it's a much broader issue then that and as Josh puts it,  "this is how these soldiers were trained to act."

The whole interview is great but if you're short on time start at 22:10...

Ron Paul Votes "No" on Government Aid to Haiti

Ron Paul was the only Congressman yesterday to vote against a resolution to authorize government reconstruction plans for Haiti. His explanation for his vote is here, in which he argues that a US reconstruction plan is just a gateway to establishing Haiti as a long term US protectorate. This concern has been echoed by the non-profit Doctors Without Borders. 

But even if we grant the US government the best of intentions, even if we dismiss these concerns as conspiracy, however dubious our reasons for doing so, we should still oppose US aid to Haiti. Extreme cases like this have a certain educational value, in that they separate the libertarian wheat from the chaff. They separate those whose libertarianism is rooted in a philosophical adherence to the non-aggression axiom and those whose libertarianism is only an emotional predisposition toward less government.

Libertarians and conservatives are right to argue that government welfare programs are immoral because they rob a certain subset of taxpayers for the benefit of a subset of tax consumers, and because the taxpayers never consented to the redistribution. Welfare programs are therefore legalized theft. No doubt many of the 411 congressmen to vote in favor of the Haiti resolution (I'm looking at you, Michelle Bachmann) have argued thusly. So how is the same extorted welfare for Haitians morally justifiable?

Albert Jay Nock: Forgotten Man of the Old Right

A fantastic article from Jeffery Tucker at the Mises Institute:

For an earlier generation of American dissidents from the prevailing ideology of left-liberalism, a rite of passage was reading Albert Jay Nock's Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, which appeared in 1943. William F. Buckley was hardly alone in seeing it as a seminal text crucial to his personal formation.

Here it is in one package, an illustration of the level of learning that had been lost with mass education, a picture of the way a true political dissident from our collectivist period thinks about the modern world, and a comprehensive argument for the very meaning of freedom and civility — all from a man who helped shape the Right's intellectual response to the triumph of FDR's welfare-warfare state.

It was destined to be a classic, read by many generations to come. But then the official doctrine changed...

Read the rest here.