ach lesson contains the following elements:
Each lesson takes about 10 minutes to complete. In only a short amount of time, you can improve your understanding of liberty and figure out where you can learn more.
- A LearnLiberty short video explaining the concept
- Suggested resources for delving deeper into the topic
- Questions to enhance your understanding
- A discussion area to share your insights and ask questions
7/21/2011
Learn Liberty!
7/13/2011
7/07/2011
A pair of fantastic articles by Anthony Gregory
Innocent Until Proven Guilty An excerpt:
An ethical code that countenances incarceration of the innocent, even in a slim minority of cases, is no bulwark whatever against the ghastliest of institutional oppressions. A people who are not profoundly and unwaveringly outraged by the false incarceration of even a single soul are unfit to be a free people. It is often said that it’s better to let ten guilty people free than leave one innocent man behind bars. The ratio should be much higher, for it is metaphysically possible for the guilty to find justice outside of the U.S. legal system, but it is impossible for the innocent to find it within. Thus is the principle of “innocent until proven guilty” of unparalleled importance. There is no word adequate to describe how unacceptable it should be to a civilized people to see an innocent man caged. Every single legal bias should be given to ensure that the prosecution proves beyond a reasonable doubt that a person committed the crime before he be deprived of his liberty or life. If the standard is any lower than that, the prosecution will not only convict innocents in the courtroom, but use the threat of false conviction to obtain plea bargains that unfairly rob the innocent of their freedom.
Why The Left Fears Libertarianism An excerpt for what may be one of the very best articles I've ever read on this topic of the Left's reaction to Libertarianism:
But libertarianism, however weak its influence today, is a much greater long-term threat to the left than is any form of conservatism, and the leftist intellectuals sense this even if they can’t articulate why. Leftism, whether they know it or not, is a distorted permutation of the classical liberal tradition. The statist left did their deal with the devil – the nation-state, centralized authority of the most rapacious kind – supposedly with the goal of expediting the liberation of the common man and leveling the playing field. More than a century since the progressives and socialists twisted liberalism into an anti-liberty, pro-state ideology, they see that they have made a huge mess of the world, that, as they themselves complain, social inequality persists, corporatism flourishes, and wars rage on. As the chief political architects of the 20th century in the West, they have no one to blame but themselves, and so they target us – the true liberals, the ones who never let go of authentic liberal idealism, love of the individual dignity and rights of every man, woman and child, regardless of nationality or class, and hatred of state violence and coercive authoritarianism in all its forms.
The Independent Institute in general does very high quality work. I would highly recommend checking out their website. Their award-winning quarterly journal, The Independent Review is absolutely fantastic as well. I've been a subscriber for the past two years and could not be happier. The really nice thing about their journal (in addition to the remarkable consistency in which they produce high quality work) is that the articles and views contained within are from a very diverse group of minds. There is no one viewpoint imposed upon the reader, and in fact I have oftentimes found myself learning greatly from those whose worldviews different quite radically from my own.
7/04/2011
The continued irrational fear of a free market monopoly
There is a piece over on pcworld.com titled, "AT&T/T-Mobile: Why this New Monopoly is Bad for Consumers" that serves as a good example of the extremely common misunderstanding of monopolies. I think it is important to highlight some distinctions of the different types of monopolies that can exist and what one means by using the word, monopoly. I am going to posit that when the overwhelming majority of the time one refers to a monopoly they think of one giant firm whom has total dominance in their respective industry, and use this power to exploit the consumer. The irony of this is that in reality the only monopoly that has ever existed that behaves in such a manner is the government or government-created monopolies.
Thomas Dilorenzo and Dominick T. Armentano, drawing on the lessons of Ludwig Von Mises and Murray Rothbard, have both successfully demonstrated that the traditional education on monopolies (as taught by government-run schools no less!) is almost exactly backwards from reality. I highly recommend the works linked to above if one is not already familiar with this topic. Standard Oil is a great example of a monopoly that allegedly harmed consumers and emerged via the free market. Upon examining the evidence, we find that Standard Oil has reduced the price of kerosene from 30 cents to 6 cents at the height of their "monopolistic powers", and their market share was decreasing at the time Anti-Trust legislation was filed! Not exactly that scary image of an oil company charging outrageous prices for their product, at the expense of the helpless consumer, after all.
When you combine this flawed education of evil free market monopolies that plagued society before the benevolent government reluctantly accepted the power of regulator and antitrust enforcer to save the helpless consumer from annihilation, with the interaction with a real monopoly, it is not surprising to find most people support government breaking up perceived monopolies.
When I referred to a real monopoly, I am referring to interactions with the government in any capacity. Ironically, this is the type of monopoly that is harmful to the consumer, and whom will continue to thrive no matter what the consumer says or does, or how terrible the product they produce is. A few examples would include the DMV, Secretary of the State as it pertains to getting business licenses and so forth, the IRS, and on and on. In all of one's personal interactions with these agencies of a monopoly in the classic sense of existing in spite and directly exploiting the consumer, the people feel that exploitation and know it to be true. If you want to open a business you need to go to the local government office and apply for a license. How much is that license? Well it depends on what state you are in, type of business etc. But there is no choice here. There is only, "pay us this sum that we have declared, or your business will be shut down."
The DMV I think speaks for itself as a model of a monopoly that exists in direct defiance to the consumers' preferences. The IRS decides how much of your income they will take this year and if it so pleases them they can modify that amount to a greater or lower degree the next year. You have zero say in this process. That's to say nothing of the atrocious wait times at the various offices, the delay in handling of the paperwork, the "you need to wait in that line to fill out X form so you can come back in Y line to get the permit to be allowed to apply for the Z license" and so on.
So in a very real sense, people have a very good "feel" for what an exploitative monopoly is like. And not surprisingly, they don't like it at all! Couple this with decades of propaganda of how the free-market had many even worse monopolies such as Ma Bell, Standard Oil, etc. it is not surprising that one supports government destroying any business that poses the threat of reaching the dreaded monopoly status.
However, it is a tragic mistake to look towards the most destructive and powerful monopoly in all of human history, the government, as the entity which determines when and whom is deemed a monopoly and thus use their power to destroy the alleged monopoly. (If you want to talk about a monopoly, how about the agency that can use violence legally to order you around!) If we look at the article I mentioned by pcworld.com at the top of this piece, we see the author is calling for the merger between AT&T and T-Mobile to be stopped as such a merger would result in a monopoly and consumers would suffer. The irony to me is that he then cites the fact that the new AT&T and Verizon would then have a whopping 80% of the market share! Now there is no doubt that is enormous. However if your argument is that this will result in AT&T being a monopoly, its probably not the best tactic to add in the market share of their rival company, Verizon, when calculating their total market share. You know because, kind of by definition, the problem with monopolies (in theory) is that there are no alternative choices.
Furthermore the author even notes that there are several additional companies in existence, but all are too small to be of note. Well that's the nice thing about free market competition. It forces companies to behave in a consumer friendly manner. I can't imagine a better boon for these smaller cell phone competitors than for AT&T to unleash their mythical monopoly powers of abusing their customers. Seems like a dream scenario for the other 20% to gain a few extra points of the market share, eh?
There is something else in that article that I want to address now, the author writes:
What's the short term effect? Verizon Wireless, the carrier I use, has ended smartphone all-you-can-eat data plans, in favor of tiered data plans, much to the immense consternation of their clientele. Why make their clients unhappy, you might ask? Because they can.
Again ignoring the fact that the author is calling AT&T a monopoly while simultaneously referring to their competitor Verizon (which currently has more market share than AT&T, the alleged monopoly!) the above paragraph really taps into a popular sentiment of consumers. Namely, extremely successful companies impose their will on consumers. Now this is irritating to see. Private companies, like Verizon and Apple, exist and rise to power only because of how efficiently they meet their consumers needs. Put differently, they achieved such enormous success by improving the lives of virtually every person on the planet. What else can you call it when a person whom finds out they are rolling out a tiered data plan, responds with shocked indignation? I mean really how greedy are these bastards? You mean I can't use my wallet sized portable computer virtually anywhere on the planet to access and download an unlimited amount of information from the Internet? How come there is never any emphasize the other way? Like oh my god, my phone is more powerful than the most powerful consumer computer was a mere 10 years ago and I can take it anywhere and download an unlimited amount of data from an unlimited number of sources on planet earth for 99 bucks a month!!
Let's remember what and why these firms got so powerful in the first place. And it is not because they make their consumers unhappy, as the author suggests. Such a statement is not only absurd on its face, in reality, all of modern civilization has been built on the precise opposite. Firms making their consumers extremely happy, better than their competitors. I hope one takes pause at the suggestion that those companies whom succeed mightily in making our world richer, should be destroyed as their reward. Let's ponder what such a world would look like if taken to its logical conclusion. And if your imagination isn't up to the task, feel free to read up on the enormous success of communist Russia. No free market monopolies there, I promise you that!