One thesis down for the count baby! Woo-hoo! Now I’ve just got to hope that the advisor I haven’t talked to in a few months actually wants to take it… and that my GPA when all the incompletes fall out actually allow me to graduate with honors. But those are details. The thing is f-ing […]

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Takings That Aren’t The Constitution is inconvenient. When bureaucrats want to seize private property, they’ve got to deal with the restrictions imposed by that pesky Fifth Amendment. As I noted a few weeks back, states can make themselves a good deal of elbow room by treating phrases like “public use” more or less the same […]

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Get a job, na na na na… So I work for the Cato Institute now. This is both exciting, because I expect it to be good, and terrifying, because I now have a little over a week to finish everything I’ve been putting off for months and find a place in D.C. Expect less blogging […]

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I just got to fulfill a little fantasy I’d been entertaining in the back of my head for the past couple of weeks. No, no — Pat Robertson is still alive, and my nipples remain unseared by hot wax. I’m talking about the final round at debate nationals. Amy and I got to run “The […]

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The NYU debate team used to have a case to the effect that “virtual” child porn ought to be made legal. I never ran it myself, in part because it felt so unsportsmanlike to make people oppose something palpably, obviously true. I felt somewhat vindicated when I read of the Supreme Court’s lopsided decision striking […]

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The Clone Wars Libertarians have long been critical of systematic distortions of science from the left. But just as censorship is the tribute tyranny pays to truth, distortion is the tribute

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Somehow or other, I’ve been tapped to debate a Keynesian at some sort of function sponsored by Jinx Magazine. So I’m brushing up on my Hayek. In other news, I had this thought about language while out with some of my boys. Terms with a narrow usage — either slang or jargon — are rather […]

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Nice Bush Oh dear lord. Maximum hilarity. Just go look. Courtesy of Harry Layman.

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Bad News: Lost the Reason internship to some Canadian dude. Good News: This means I can go to the Social Change Workshop that the inimitable Will Wilkinson is running at UVA. Bad News: It’s the same week as the release party for Doug Rushkoff‘s new novel, Exit Strategy, which should be a good time. But […]

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Legislative Diapers First, apologies to those of you who, on the basis of the title, were anticipating a column about Strom Thurmond. I don’t want to talk about the literal diapers lawmakers wear, but the metaphorical ones they feel obligated to fasten to the rest of us. Unfortunately for our bargain-basement copies of Plato’s “guardians,” […]

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