yazadjal.com

Opening Salvo
I did not attend an LSS and become a Libertarian. I always had ideas and opinions about the social, economic, political and religious side of life. It is after I attended the seminar that I realised that my ideas fall closest to the Libertarian school of thought. A few years prior to that I […]

A good friend of mine has a favourite saying: “There are three ways of getting anything you want. Love, money or force. Libertarians don’t believe in force. So you’ve got to be content with either love or money”
Want Gmail?
GmailSwap shows you how via love (and maybe some money). If it’s only cold cash […]

My city goes to the polls in the second phase of Lok Sabha elections tomorrow. I saw a banner today claiming that the definition of an idiot is one who does not vote. I was disgusted by the cheap tactic of insult used to goad someone to voting. There are many people for whom the […]

Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek (super new blog, BTW) talks about his candidate for the most dangerous idea of modern times:
the deification of the state. By this I mean the widespread belief that a particular set of people who proclaim a selfless love of humanity and who follow prescribed rituals that take place in official […]

Jivha doesn’t like Gmail. Worse, he doesn’t like suggestions people make to people who don’t like Gmail. So Jivha goes off on a rant. I’m going to fisk the rant and will leave the Gmail details to others.
Don’t like the fact that lax gun control coupled with high-calibre/assault-style weapons are killing innocent people? Here’s a […]

Thought provoking piece by Jesse Walker on libertarianism from the bottom up.
Link Courtesy: The Agitator

The first ever quiz I took to find out whether I was a libertarian or not was the World’s Smallest Political Quiz (WSPQ) Well, as I already considered myself not just libertarian but anarcho-capitalist (I had just finished reading the Machinery of Capitalism), I scored a perfect 100 on both personal and economic self government […]

Often, there I’ll be, debating how meaningless I consider something like
astrology, and someone will say, “MadMan, you say you’re a libertarian.
Then why don’t you show any tolerance for the views of others?”

Ah… “tolerance”. In India, most of us are taught as children to
“respect your elders”, “respect other people’s views” and
other such unconditional statements. That’s a […]

There is a story that the famous French mercantilist minister, Colbert, once asked a group of businessmen what he could do for them. One of the men, Legendre, is supposed to have replied, Laissez nous faire–leave us alone. Several French authors in the earlier part of the 18th century, including the Marquis d’Argenson, used the […]

Digdug made this comment on Ravi’s driving license post.
For me “we” own the roads(opposed to your view of the government owning the roads) and the government only administers them on “our” behalf.
I wonder how “we” as citizens own the roads. The only analogy that comes close is that of a shareholder in a company. […]

Sauvik Chakraverti was in Mangalore and he writes about his observations. As usual, a good read.
The other day I was taken to a beach just beyond the New Mangalore Port Trust. What struck was the wall. The entire port is surrounded by a 20 ft high wall.
… because of some theory, Mangalore has moved […]

Ck posted this in the comments section of the increasingly heated discussion about Free Software. He also requests comments, so I’ll give this piece the good ol’ fiske.

The libertarian paradox
By Gerry McGovern
There seems to be a rule that everything embodies a paradox, that everything embodies its opposite.
From the very first period I used the Internet […]

I rarely like a blog post so much that I cut paste the entire post here. But Alex Singleton’s piece on Voices and Exits in the Adam Smith Blog is superb.
Collectivists like ‘voice’ as the system for improving society. We get a say. We should all be forced to go to state schools, but we […]

High on my “to-blog-about” list is this article on Friedrich Hayek by Virginia Postrel. It’s a wonderful introduction to an economist who won the Nobel for his work on monetary theory, and had a varied repetoire that included several works on political science, philosopy, law and psychology!
Beginning with “The Sensory Order,” he began to differentiate […]

Germany looks to abolish the military draft. And the main concern in this article seems to be that
[this may] pose a serious problem for the social system, which depends on those men that opt for the alternative — community service. …
Around 90,000 young German men are registered yearly for community service, and approximately 80 percent […]

On first read I found this very funny. Rahul Gandhi decides to take his girlfriend with him to the family vacation. A retired professor takes umbrage at the fact that the couple are not married and files a case under the Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act, 1956.
The funny part is that he was upset at […]

Brad Edmonds at LewRockwell.com spends his Christmas Eve identifying with Ebenezer Scrooge. In this era with continual sound bites about corporate social responsibility, Edmonds suggests that “the two most charitable things you can do are start a business, and reduce government.”
Scrooge protests that Marley was a good businessman in life; and Scrooge himself is a […]

While “with us or against us” has been a staple in US foreign policy (GWB is a forceful supporter of the theme), I find it surprising that bloggers who are rabidly anti Bush also use this principle as a crutch.
Last week, I happened to comment on Jivha’s post on Uma Bharti forgetting development / […]

Reason magazine celebrates it’s 35th birthday by bringing out a list of 35 heroes of freedom who have made the world a groovier place to be. The selection has some of my favourites (Friedman, Hayek, Navratilova, Rand and Simon), but is eclectic (Madonna, Mandela and Willie Nelson) and irreverent (Flynt, Rodman and “the Yuppie”) in […]

Cato Institute provides a great daily commentary on libertarian issues. They focus largely on the US, but many are universal gems.
The Meaning of Laissez Faire by Ludwig von Mises is one such classic, written in the socialist hey-days of the late forties.
Laissez faire means: Let the common man choose and act; do not force […]