Jeff Riggenbach on Liberty.me

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Clarence Darrow on Freedom, Justice, and War Mar 25, 2011

Clarence Darrow is best known today as the Chicago lawyer who defended John T. Scopes in the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925. A character based loosely on him is played by Spencer Tracy in the 1960 movie version of the classic play about the Scopes trial, Inherit the Wind. Darrow was long known perhaps equally well as the Chicago lawyer who got life imprisonment instead of the death penalty for two 19-year-olds, Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold, in theirsensational 1924 trial for the kidnapping and murder of a 14-year-old boy, which they had undertaken to prove that they could commit the perfect crime. Orson...

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Is the Tea Party’s Revolution Serious? Mar 18, 2011

Jill Lepore is a professor of history at Harvard and a journalist whose work appears in the major mainstream media. The New York Times and theLos Angeles Times are on the list of publications to which she contributes, as is The New Yorker, where she's listed on the masthead as a "staff writer." Her latest book, which was published back in September by Princeton University Press, is called The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle over American History. Unsurprisingly, it reads rather like a long magazine article. It meanders here and there in a leisurely fashion; it includes tidbits from...

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Some Further Notes on Libertarian Science Fiction Mar 11, 2011

This essay is about four writers, none of whom was a libertarian, but each of whom wrote something back in the 1960s that made a significant contribution to the libertarian tradition. The first of the four was a science-fiction writer, though only occasionally. He was born 94 years ago last week, on February 25, 1917, in suburban Manchester, England. His name at birth was John Burgess Wilson. His family was Roman Catholic, which at that time virtually guaranteed that he would be confirmed in the Church at the age of about seven. He had, therefore, already come to be known as "Jack...

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Libertarianism and Science Fiction: What’s the Connection? Feb 11, 2011

One day in the late spring of 1951, something rather astonishing happened in an otherwise nondescript shopping district in a medium-sized city somewhere in the American Midwest. Right there, right smack in the middle of the block, where Aunt Sally's Lunch and Patterson Tailors had long stood, there suddenly appeared what a later newspaper account could only describe as "a strange building, apparently a kind of gunshop." The front of this building sported a large, brightly shining sign … which read: FINE WEAPONS • THE RIGHT TO BUY WEAPONS IS THE RIGHT TO BE FREE. The window display was made...

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The Reagan Fraud- And After Feb 4, 2011

Like most Republican politicians since the early 1930s, Ronald Reagan always portrayed himself throughout his political career as a champion of limited government, individual rights, and free enterprise — the classical-liberal values, which, of course, he absurdly described as "conservative." But, like almost all Republican politicians since the early 1930s, he seemed to forget all about these values once he got into office and assumed the reins of power. Consider, as a case in point, Reagan's eight years (1966–1974) as governor of California. As Murray Rothbard noted in 1980, Despite his bravado about having stopped the growth of state government, the...

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Frank Chodorov, Educator Dec 31, 2010

Frank Chodorov was an early-20th-century Georgist libertarian who devoted the last two decades of his life — basically the 1940s and '50s — to advocacy journalism. He was also a militant nonvoter. "A people can vote themselves into slavery," he wrote, "though they cannot vote themselves out of it." For "never has the vote been used to abolish privilege; it has always been used to demand new ones or to effect a change in the beneficiaries." It was possible, he thought, that "social ostracism" might convince those politicians "whose self-respect ha[d] not dropped to the vanishing point [to] get out of the...

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Frank Chodorov, Nonvoter Dec 24, 2010

It was 44 years ago this holiday season, on December 28, 1966, that Frank Chodorov died. Chodorov had been born nearly 80 years earlier, on the day after Valentine's Day, February 15, 1887, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He was the youngest child of a pair of Russian Jewish immigrants, who gave him the name Fishel Chodorowsky. But he was the only one of their eleven children to be born in this country, and he seems to have known early on that he was an American who needed an American name. As a child, he rechristened himself "Frank"...

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Hushing Up Conspiracy Theories Feb 17, 2010

If you spend much time on the Internet, you probably already know who Cass Sunstein is: he's a former professor of law and political science at the University of Chicago, where, during the 1990s, he met and became close friends with a fellow member of the law-school faculty named Barack Obama. Currently, Sunstein is a law professor at Harvard, but he's taking a leave of absence from that position so he can "serve" as Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Obama administration. The White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, according to Wikipedia,...

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