August 02, 2005

Oh, Grow Up!
By Lady Liberty

In a conversation with my mother last weekend, she remarked that she was glad I'd grown up to have a different "sort" of friend than I'd chosen when I was younger. "I don't know why you insisted on being friends with such bad kids," she said, "but I'm happy you have such nice friends now."

The "bad" kids my mother is talking about were those I first met when I entered Junior High School. Most of them weren't really bad. Sure, they wore blue jeans instead of dressier clothes, and they skipped school sometimes. Many of them smoked cigarettes on the sidewalk in front of the school between classes. Some of them managed to come into possession of some small amount of alcohol on Friday or Saturday nights. The girls wore — the horror! — heavy make-up. The boys, more often than not, had long hair. (Read the rest here)

The Politics of Troop Withdrawal
By Ivan Eland

In Iraq, like everywhere else, if things don’t add up, it is safe to assume that politics is involved. Although the insurgency in recent months has worsened, Gen. George W. Casey, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, astonishingly claims that security in Iraq has improved and that substantial U.S. troop withdrawals are possible by as early as next spring. What gives? The congressional elections in 2006.

Although Bush administration officials have implied that demands by Democrats for a U.S. troop withdrawal timetable are “unpatriotic” and “aid the enemy,” when electoral politics is involved, the administration is all too willing to predict troop reductions during a specified time period. They know that the Democrats will try to make political hay—probably starting around next spring—from the growing unpopularity here at home of the continued occupation of Iraq. By showing some incremental and token progress toward getting out of the quagmire, the administration hopes to contain the damage Democrats could do on this issue at election time. (Read the rest here)

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Libertarian Commentary on The News
By Nathan A. Barton © 2005

How much are you willing to pay? That question is basic to free market economies, and presumes a lot of things, especially that transactions are voluntary and not forced. That same question applies to a libertarian society: the other side of socio-economic freedom's coin: how much are you willing to pay for a specific liberty? Unlike the goods on the free-market in general, that payment for liberty is usually NOT solely in the form of money or some substitute - it is often in the form of an increased risk ("reduced safety"), or more bluntly, is measured more in blood than in dollars. As we look at news today, ask yourself: how much are YOU, how much am I, willing to pay for the freedom we enjoy?

Theft by Government

Letter from Zimbabwe: Darkness Falling
Private
NOTE: Usually, the news in this column is taken from publications, either on-line, broadcast, or print. But sometimes, the news isn't in any of these forms, and this is one of them. Therefore, I've posted a private letter on my blog.
Demolitions of private houses and businesses continue in Zimbabwe. President Mugabe's regime, apparently confident that the UN and the Western Powers will ignore his actions, or just "jaw-jaw" about them, has increased the seizure and destruction of private property in the name of enforcing codes and cracking down on illegal activities. Stories of resistance, killings, and other violence continue to filter out, but for the most part, the true story is not being told to the world. (Read the rest here)

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