The only effective treatment for Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s narcolepsy is no longer available, thanks to the risk-averse regulatory establishment.

You know what they say: if a regulation can save just one life (in six years) — who cares how many others it wrecks?

Will Wilkinson debunks the notion that private charity would be better spent to “leverage” government spending — in other words, in rent-seeking.

On Wikipedia, a quarrel over this sentence:

Most members of libertarian parties support low taxes and a balanced budget because they believe citizens should keep most of the money they earn, while logically consistent libertarians, including anarcho-capitalists, refuse all methods to subject people to tax.

The words logically consistent were inserted by Irgendwer (German for anywho), who objects to replacing them with radical or even other. While any taxation is obviously inconsistent with the letter of the nonaggression principle, I do not agree that the NAP is the only coherent foundation for libertarian policy; two proofs of the same theorem need not resemble each other. (See also.) I see nothing logically inconsistent in the minarchist opinion that an anarchic order cannot keep the burden of crime below that of crime-plus-tax in a well-conceived low-tax state, and thus that such a state minimizes coercion (which is undesirable even if not the fundamental sin). I’m an anarchist not because I believe such a state is logically impossible but because I believe it is practically impossible: to prevent such a state from mutating into a predator is a prohibitively difficult engineering problem, which does not lend itself to empirical tinkering.

Some libertarian writers worry too much about the deficiencies of either NAP or utilitarianism in extreme cases. In the absence of divine revelation, moral philosophy makes more sense as an empirical science than as an axiomatic one like mathematics (or theology!). It’s a bit incongruous to insist on individualism, whose moral force comes from our observable differences, and on an axiomatic approach, which must abstract away some of those differences.

An empirical science infers the axioms (laws of nature) from the “theorems” (phenomena), and tests them by attempting to derive the latter from the former. If the derivation fails, the scientist asks where was the flaw in my reasoning? and the engineer asks is this approximation good enough to work with until a better one comes along? As a citizen (by which I mean a member of a civilization) seeking to live a moral life, I am more engineer than scientist; I find the nonaggression principle both “close enough” and conveniently simple. And the Coase principle suggests that wherever nonaggression is not “close enough” the deficiency is not the end of the world.

Thus spake the insomniac, who hopes no one was overly bored by it.

Claire Wolfe: The Quality of a Free Man (cited by Rational Review News Digest)

James Leroy Wilson says some things that I have attempted to say about, for example, highways:

Perhaps a genuinely free market would have seen the development of organic economies driven by local production and less on mass production and trade. People might have less of what they didn’t need anyway, and lead quiet, simple, but happy and stress-free lives. Or perhaps the free market would have taken us to unimagined technological heights and a prosperous and peaceful planetary economy.

I find both possibilities appealing. And that is why, ultimately, I can’t advance a libertarian worldview that exalts one vision over the other . . . .

Leftovers from September: Trapped in New Orleans: First By the Floods, Then By Martial Law

Putting on my constitutional minarchist hat for a moment . .

The White House and its apologists have often claimed (successfully) that the US Constitution does not restrict its actions outside US borders. I argue in response that, since the US Govt’s authority (if any) is derived through the Constitution, wherever the Constitution does not apply no such authority can exist.

If I were President I’d obviously shut down Camp X and order an end to “rendition”. I was about to say I’d decree a policy that we don’t do anything by proxy that we could not legally do ourselves within the US — but something is scratching at a distant corner of my mind, as if I’m forgetting something.

Can you think of any exceptions to such a policy that would pass the filter of minarchist ethics?

Medical Guesswork (Business Week)

The navel and the WTO antidote, by Sauvik Chakraverti

a slightly naughty chuckle

When Bigots Become Reformers: The Progressive Era’s shameful record on race (Reason)

Arnold Kling: Bleeding-Heart Libertarianism

an annoying conversation that every libertarian has sooner or later, in template form (Degrees of Freedom)

I like Bruce Fein‘s language:

The nation’s experiment with Prohibition underscores the limits of the law without moral consensus. The Prohibition Amendment was ratified as a type of homage that vice pays to virtue. Popular morality never celebrated abstinence. . . . Prohibition laws died in adolescence for lack of moral sustenance.

Immigration restrictions are even more problematic than their Prohibition counterparts. While alcohol consumption was not generally condemned, it was likewise not popularly acclaimed as a virtue. In contrast, the conduct and character of illegal aliens elicit accolades by at least half the population. . . .