I’m happy to see something good came of that silly Stephen Metcalf hit on Robert Nozick: The smart folks over at Bleeding Heart Libertarians have decided to form a sort of online book club to reread Anarchy, State, and Utopia. In the first section, Nozick attempts to show how a (minimal) government could arise from […]

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(1) One of my first thoughts upon getting my hands on an iPad was: “You know, once they get a camera in this thing and come up with a well-tailored group video chat client, this could really change the way people socialize.” At present, in-person, face-to-face socialization and digital communication with people not present are […]

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Notwithstanding the stereotype that libertarians care about little other than low taxes, I don’t write much about tax policy. But I was reflecting today on Nozick’s coyly Marx-inflected comparison of taxation to compulsory or stolen labor—which however overblown as rhetoric got me thinking about how different types of people might respond to the same tax […]

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Since writing about the Wilt Chamberlain example last week, I’ve been revisiting Anarchy, State, and Utopia and thinking about what legitimate criticisms can be leveled against this particular step in Nozick’s argument.  I still think Stephen Metcalf’s complaints are basically frivolous, and his recent response to his critics does little to change my view.  On […]

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Responding to yesteday’s post, Matt Yglesias argues that Stephen Metcalf is still kinda on point because, even if Nozick remained a libertarian on some grounds—maybe pragmatic or consequentialist ones—he nevertheless abandoned the deeper philosophical opposition to redistributive taxation that characterizes Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Matt does, however, back off when I point him to pages […]

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In a piece over at Slate, Stephen Metcalf seems determined to prove that there’s nothing too fundamentally confused to be published on the site as long as it gets in a few good jabs at libertarians. My Cato colleagues Jason Kuznicki and David Boaz have already chimed in on the topic, but I wanted to […]

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Yesterday over at Cato, I poked some fun at an ill-conceived boycott of the Huffington Post, which has committed the sin of (a) making money and (b) inviting an assortment of people to voluntarily contribute unpaid blog posts. Matt Yglesisas wrote a rather less snarky post similarly defending the practice, prompting a response from Erik […]

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I’m inclined to agree with Amanda Marcotte that the media feeding frenzy over Anthony Weiner’s extramarital sexting and online flirtation is unsettling insofar as it seems to abandon any pretense that some public nexus—lawbreaking, misuse of public authority, or at the very least a clear conflict with an official’s avowed political positions—is necessary to make […]

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Our politics has gotten so crazy lately that we seem to have developed a standard form for designating conspiracy theories, just as we mechanically append -Gate to the scandal du jour: the “-er” suffix. You know, “Truther,” “Birther,” and now (for those who suspect Osama bin Laden may still be alive) “Deather.” I wonder whether […]

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In a recent post, I suggested that claims about “desert” are generally misplaced in arguments about copyright—whether they are deployed on behalf of “deserving” small fry artists or against “undeserving” labels. As some commenters pointed out, there’s no obvious reason this argument should be restricted to the domain of copyright—and quite right. I think most […]

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