Mark Reasor

[Casey Mattox @CaseyMattox_]

It's happening!

[F. A. Hayek Quotes @FAHayekSays]

“It is this nationalistic bias which frequently provides the bridge from conservatism to collectivism—to think in terms of ‘our’ industry or resource is only a short step away from demanding that these national assets be directed in the national interest.”

— Friedrich Hayek

[Mark Reasor @MarkReasor]

Turns out I’m an immigrant. Who knew?

[wanye @xwanyex]

This rhetorical trick is another example of, “pretending not to understand.” I understand that liberals think that being born in the country is a magical transforming process by which you become an American, but when we say immigrants, we of course mean their kids and grandkids, too.

[Casey Mattox @CaseyMattox_]

My friend sent me this opinion and told me it was the perfect libertarian opinion. I wrote him back and told him it was NOT the perfect libertarian opinion because it hadn't said anything at all about contract rights, or fiat currency, or taxation as theft, or foreign wars, or getting naked.

[Chris Freiman @cafreiman]

Virginia Postrel’s “dynamist”/“stasist” distinction is far more illuminating than left/right.

[David J. Bier @David_J_Bier]

Open borders is now just any legal immigration at all

[Mark Reasor @MarkReasor]

@ASFleischman Wait until they find out how the Heller case came to be. (H/T @damonroot)

[Bonchie @bonchieredstate]

This thing where people pretend to have uncovered a massive conspiracy when it’s actually just common knowledge (in this case, told by Rosa Parks herself) is moronic.

The buses were segregated and she was arrested. The rest is online brain rot trying to justify it.

[Paul Schofield @pschofie79]

My main objection to Rawls is that it would be hard to find a veil that big.

[Matt Welch @MattWelch]

And 62 days after that, the Soviet Union gave up.

[Mark Reasor @MarkReasor]

@daveweigel And the second Mark Lewisohn volume on the Beatles.

[Patrick Carroll @PatrickC1995]

"Liberty is not the daughter but the mother of order."

— Proudhon

[Shoshana Weissmann, Sloth Committee Chair 🦥 @senatorshoshana]

Fukuyama thoughts relevant. Struggle out of boredom, for sake of struggle

"Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, they then will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy."

[Charles C. W. Cooke @charlescwcooke]

Because profanity is *part of* that magnificent language.

[hellogan1 @gebrauchsmusik]

When you don’t understand why there’s a [sic] it’s like okay which of the three of us is stupid

[Brian Albrecht @BrianCAlbrecht]

Prices aren’t a terrible way to allocate goods to people who value them most

[Edward Feser @FeserEdward]

Peter is a good guy, but he’s letting righteous indignation get the better of him, as are other decent people who wrongly support the war. As everyone should have learned from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, having the aim of liberating people from a tyrannical government does not magically guarantee that a military action carried out in the service of that aim is likely to succeed at all, or to succeed without an unacceptable cost. Tens of thousands of civilians died as a result of the war in Afghanistan, and hundreds of thousands of civilians died as a result of the war in Iraq. The populations in both countries also suffered years of economic and social instability. In Afghanistan, after two decades the result was that the Taliban simply took over again.

In the case of Iran, destroying civilian infrastructure would make everyday life impossible for ordinary Iranian people and cause them incalculable suffering and a refugee crisis. (Just think of what would happen to your own family if the bridges and power plants around your city and state were all destroyed – think of the ripple effects with respect to employment, food supply, hospitals, and so on.) And a ground war to remove the regime would be an interminable bloodbath for both the Iranians and U.S. military that would make Iraq look tame, and even less likely to succeed given the size and terrain of Iran. It would also cost far more in civilian lives than the oppressive measures the Iranian government inflicts on its people do.

Nor is it just Iraq and Afghanistan that should give us pause. Think of the extremely bloody Korean war that ended in simply restoring the status quo, or the Vietnam war which we lost at a similar cost. To say that any of these wars could have had a happy ending if only we’d kept the meat grinder going for another five or ten or twenty years is pure ideology talking, not evidence and not wisdom.

Sometimes there simply is no good option. Sometimes “Don’t make things even worse” is the best we can do for the moment. People on this idiotic site who shoot their mouths off about the Iranian protesters killed, but then in the next breath cheer on the idea of reducing Iranian civilian infrastructure to rubble simply show thereby that they are completely unserious. (Not that Peter has done that.) But people who (like Peter) don’t go that far, yet still seem to put the burden of proof on the critics of the war, forget that rule one in these matters, as in medicine, is “First, do no harm.” The burden of proof is on them to show that (and show how) their proposed military action is actually likely to realize its aim. It’s not on critics to show that it won’t.

[George Selgin @GeorgeSelgin]

It is as foolish for certain Austrians to reject any use of mathematics to represent and analyze economic activity as it for certain mainstream economists to dismiss economic arguments expressed entirely in prose.

[Scott Lincicome @scottlincicome]

Hawley-Sanders bill incoming!