Jeff Riggenbach on Liberty.me

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  • Jeff Riggenbach

Why I Am a Left Libertarian Aug 6, 2015

Many libertarians say the traditional Left/Right political spectrum has become meaningless and useless.  But to the extent that this is true for them, this is only because they have allowed themselves to be befuddled by political fraud and, perhaps, by a weak background in political history.  The spectrum is just as useful and meaningful as it always was, which is very.  It is necessary only to clarify one’s thinking about the past century in American politics to see that this is so. But let us begin at the beginning – with what the left/right spectrum meant when it was created...

By Jeff Riggenbach Vote44 78

Is There a Psychology of Liberty? May 7, 2014

In a previous article, “Libertarian Psychology,” I made a few very brief remarks on the importance of psychology for libertarians and sketched the lives, careers, and ideas of two particular intellectuals: the libertarian psychiatrist Thomas Szasz and the libertarian psychologist Timothy Leary, both born in the year 1920. Now I’d like to add a few comments on a couple of later libertarian psychologists, one born in the 1930s and another born in the 1940s. The first of these two psychologists, Nathaniel Branden, was born on April 9, 1930, in Brampton, Ontario, a suburb of Toronto. Or so you might say today —...

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Taking more than 20 mg levitra ‘I Do My Thing and You Do Your Thing’ Dec 26, 2012

Once upon a time in America (it was just after World War II), mainstream psychology came in two and only two forms. There was behaviorism and there was psychoanalysis, and no one with any other intellectual orientation need apply. The theorists on campuses were behaviorists; the therapists in offices were psychoanalysts. Then came the revolution led by the humanistic psychologists, beginning in the 1950s and rapidly gaining strength through the 1960s and early ’70s. It brought encounter groups, regional “growth centers” like Northern California’s notorious “clothing optional” Esalen Institute, experimentation with LSD and other psychedelic drugs, and “client-centered therapy.” Nothing...

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Robert Anton Wilson Aug 15, 2011

Robert Anton Wilson was born January 18, 1932 in Brooklyn. He grew up in the section of Brooklyn known as Flatbush and, later, after his father lost his job on the waterfront, in a much poorer section of Brooklyn known as Gerritsen Beach. "Rents were very low" in Gerritsen Beach, Wilson recalled in his book Down to Earth, the largely autobiographical second volume of his Cosmic Trigger Trilogy, "because only the poor Irish Catholics lived there." At another point in the same account, he refers to his old neighborhood as "an Irish Catholic ghetto." Not that all Irish Catholics were poor,...

By Jeff Riggenbach Vote5 1

Bastiat for the Ages Jul 8, 2011

It was back in 1962, as I recall, when I was 15 years old and a junior in high school, that I first read something by a French writer on free trade whose name, my friends and I thought at first, would probably be pronounced "Frederick BAHS-tee-aht." Since several of us were enrolled in Madame Wall's beginning French class that semester, it didn't take us too long to discover that his name was probably closer to "Frayed-air-EEK Bah-STYAH." But his ideas fascinated us all the same, as did the organization whose free pamphlets included Bastiat's arguments against tariffs and other...

By Jeff Riggenbach Vote6 0

C.M. Kornbluth and the Syndicate Jun 17, 2011

The late Samuel Edward Konkin III was a firm believer in the power of science fiction to spread the libertarian message. He himself had been converted to libertarianism partly by reading the works of Robert A. Heinlein, and Heinlein remained his favorite science fiction writer for the rest of his life. Every July for years, he threw a joint birthday party for himself and Robert A. Heinlein (Sam's birthday was July 8; Heinlein's was July 7). The last and largest issue of his magazine,New Libertarian, was devoted to Heinlein, as was a sort of mini-conference he held, also in the late 1980s, under...

By Jeff Riggenbach Vote4 0

The Anarchist Conscience Jun 10, 2011

If the libertarian tradition is going to endure and grow (in both size and influence), it's necessary for younger libertarians to do two things. First they need to familiarize themselves with that tradition. Second, and more fundamentally, they need to add to it. Enter Gary Chartier, Southern California law professor. Chartier was born in Southern California in 1966. He grew up in Riverside County, out in the desert east of Los Angeles. And when he hit adolescence, around the early 1980s, his reading about political economy convinced him that he was a libertarian. "I was in many ways a fairly...

By Jeff Riggenbach Vote5 0

The Brilliance of Randolph Bourne May 27, 2011

Randolph Bourne was an American intellectual journalist who flourished for a few years in the second decade of the 20th century — in the Teens, the decade that ran from 1910 to 1920. Bourne wrote mostly for magazines during this period. His byline was particularly familiar to readers of The New Republic — until his radically antiwar views on the eve of the US government's intervention in World War I got him fired. He moved over to The Seven Arts, a newly launched magazine with a smaller circulation than The New Republic and one less well suited to Bourne's particular talents and interests, since its...

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Ambiguous Utopias Apr 15, 2011

The mid-1970s — meaning, let us say, the five-year period encompassing the years 1973, ’74, ’75, ’76, and ’77 — was a heady time for the modern American libertarian movement. To those of us who were involved back then, it seemed we were on the verge of a major breakthrough. The first book on the libertarian movement to be brought out by a major mainstream publisher, Jerome Tuccille’s Radical Libertarianism, had appeared in 1970. In 1973, it was joined by two more such books — David Friedman’s The Machinery of Freedom and Murray Rothbard’s For a New Liberty. That same year, Harry Browne’s How I...

By Jeff Riggenbach Vote4 0

Friedrich Hayek and American Science Fiction Apr 8, 2011

Hello world!

By Jeff Riggenbach Vote3 0

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