Positive Liberty

Good for Poland. I wish there were more such trials. Many, many more.

Jonathan Rauch gives what I think is the strongest case for being pro-gay marriage, but against polygamy. Now, this isn’t to say that government shouldn’t recognize polygamous marriages. Perhaps competing interests, like the freedom of adults to enter into whatever consensual contractual arrangements they wish, should trump the concerns that Rauch raises. (See my past post on the issue.)

However, Rauch’s argument does put to rest the claim advanced by Stanley Kurtz et al. that “if we recognize gay marriage, we have no logical grounds for saying no to polygamy.” Wrong, legalized polygamy raises a whole set of concerns not implicated by gay marriage.

If you’re near a newsstand in the next month, grab a copy of Smithsonian magazine and check out the photograph on pp. 56-57. It’s the most astonishing photo I’ve seen of the devastation wrought by the San Francisco earthquake of April 18, 1906. Unfortunately, it’s not posted online—but the article is.

Update: Oh, wait! Here it is…along with some other equally awesome photos.

A very nice commentary from Mark Brnovich at the Goldwater Institute.

Some brief reactions to Kuznicki’s thoughts on immigration.

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It seems Sandefur and I have some disagreements on immigration. I’m not entirely clear on how deep they go, so I’m offering some clarifications.

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In Utah, small businesses beg to differ with a bigoted local government:

Signs began popping up in store windows this week in Kanab, Utah proclaiming ”Everyone welcome here!” in a desperate move to avoid a threatened gay boycott. Some businesses went so far as putting small rainbow flag stickers on their front doors.

Dozens of business owners in the small southern Utah community are trying all they can to distance themselves from a proclamation by the city council that Kanab supports the “natural family” consisting of a working husband, a stay-at-home wife and a “full quiver of children.”

The measure was passed by the council in January angering gays in the state and prompting LGBT groups to consider calling a boycott.

Good for them.

Oh, and I’m still grinning about that “full quiver of children” thing. Yes, I know it’s in the Bible — but see, atheist children come in broods.

I’m sad to say that Professor Bernard Siegan, one of the most important figures in economic liberty law, author of Economic Liberties And The Constitution and other important books, died on Monday. He was 82.

Prof. Siegan’s importance to the development of libertarianism and the law is evident from these tributes from two of my PLF colleagues.

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Dan Weintraub has the scoop on eminent domain reform on the 2006 California ballot.

The illegal immigration problem is so severe in Southern California that it is difficult for people elsewhere in the country, including even Northern Californians, to really understand what’s going on. Whole areas of Southern California are now virtually Mexico. The population of illegal immigrants is enormous, and climbing steadily, at the rates of at least hundreds per day.

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Yet another example of caving in to threats of violence from Islamic radicals:

Borders and Waldenbooks stores will not stock the April-May issue of Free Inquiry magazine because it contains cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that provoked deadly protests among Muslims in several countries.

I’m beginning to think that many Americans don’t really believe in free speech, and we know that the rest of the world doesn’t care much about it. They believe in free speech as long as it’s convenient or as long as it doesn’t offend a protected group. There are people who want to destroy our right to speak out on anything that offends them and they are willing to kill and maim to make sure that happens. If our response to those threats is to shut down our own right to do so, then their goal is achieved without firing a shot. We simply can’t let that happen. Our freedom is too important and it cannot be negotiable.

The solution is not to refuse to publish the caricatures, it is to publish them everywhere so there’s no one to target. That’s why I published them here, with my full and real name exposed along with them. And I am appalled that a bookstore - a business that relies completely on the right to free expression for their very existence - would cave in and refuse to even stock a magazine that contains the caricatures.

I’ve returned from a fantastic vacation, which included a brief stop in Orange County where I gave a speech…in my pajamas.

In an eye-opening post about the hidden history of comic books, Rob MacDougall writes the following of DC Comics co-founder Harry Donnenfeld and his sordid past:

The trucks that carried Donnenfeld’s “spicies” [sexually explicit pulp magazines] also distributed Margaret Sanger’s (then illegal) birth control, Al Smith’s campaign literature, and Frank Costello’s mob liquor. [Donnenfeld's] Eastern News handled Hugo Gernsback’s “scientifiction” stories and Bernarr MacFadden’s body-building magazines, each a parent to Superman and the superhero in their own way. I like that notion a lot — the alt-dot-culture of the 1920s and 1930s, a crucible of cheap magazines and disreputable ideas — and I wish I knew of more good writing on the area. If you haven’t noticed, I’m very fond of unexpected historical connections, especially when they reach into the weirder corners of Americana.

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An oldie but a goodie, from Reason’s archives (h/t Virginia Postrel):

They were out there six days, huddling under the tarp to shield themselves from the maddening sun, clinging desperately to the raft as summer storms sent waves crashing overhead. Always they were scanning the horizon, hoping for the first flickering glimpse of the Florida coastline.

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It doesn’t seem as though France has much of an economic future if this type of thing continues. They have to transition away from a system of guaranteed tenure for all workers and towards an American employment-at-will like rule if they want to compete in the global economy.

Future predictions are something that I don’t often engaged in — because so many people get it wrong. There is talk about “the Euro” beating the dollar for ultimate future global economic hegemony. Well, the only way that that’s going to happen is if their economy can compete with ours. And the only way Europe can compete with America, in the long term, is if their economy further deregulates (and if they cut their top marginal tax rates) — at least deregulates to America’s level of economic flexibility (which is far from ideal laissez faire capitalism; but relatively speaking, it’s better in America than most if not all of Western Europe, save for maybe Switzerland).

But…if this type of nonsense continues in France and other parts of Western Europe, I’d put my eggs in the dollar’s basket.