One missed note about Ron Paul

In my long Ron Paul post, I left out a point I wanted to make about Paul’s dog-whistle politics. For those unfamiliar with the idea, dog-whistle politics is “a type of political campaigning or speechmaking which employs coded language that appears to mean one thing to the general population but has a different or more… Continue reading One missed note about Ron Paul

Revisiting pricing out the poor

Peter Frase had an excellent piece on Thursday discussing the nature of left neoliberal pricing schemes. I wrote about some of the problems with these pricing schemes a little while ago, and I want to highlight one of the arguments Frase and I both made. Frase writes at the very end of his post: There’s… Continue reading Revisiting pricing out the poor

The rhetoric of job-killing has reached absurd levels

The Environmental Protection Agency released new regulations on mercury emissions this week. Predictably, the right-wing has been screaming about the extent to which these regulations will kill jobs. Many observers have already figured out that the right-wing has decided to just call anything it does not like job-killing whether it is true or not. But… Continue reading The rhetoric of job-killing has reached absurd levels

Environmentalism poses a problem for libertarian ideology

George Monbiot had an article in the Guardian on Monday about bastardised libertarianism and its inability to understand the real freedoms being fought for by environmentalists and social justice advocates. However, Monbiot’s treatment of environmentalism’s threat to libertarianism was a bit sloppy. He got sucked into the negative freedom and positive freedom debate, and although… Continue reading Environmentalism poses a problem for libertarian ideology