The site will feature classic and new articles and video lectures, never shown before, of such libertarian stalwarts as F. A. Hayek, Murray Rothbard, Milton Friedman, and Joan Kennedy Taylor. Libertarian philosopher and intellectual historian George H. Smith will contribute a weekly essay. His first is titled “Religious Toleration versus Religious Freedom.”

The site also has a blog.

Check it out!

Dog bites man.

FEE Timely Classic
“Government as Consumer” by Sheldon Richman

The “right to marry” being celebrated is the right of gays to place their intimate relationships under State control and so reap the legally mandated benefits offered to married people. The lawsuit being denies that the State has any right to participate in a private sexual arrangement between consenting adults and so attempts to avoid the legally mandated penalties imposed on “unacceptable” arrangements.

The first embraces marriage as a State-run institution and expands its scope; the second seeks to define marriage as a private matter. Logically, libertarians should reject gay marriage and applaud the polygamist’s stand.

But rejecting gay marriage is not that simple … as the division among libertarians reveals. Some fully endorse the “right” of gay marriage, and even those of us with reservations applaud the sight of gays weeping with joy as they are pronounced “married.” I find myself muttering “it is about damned time” even though I oppose State involvement in marriage.

Why I Oppose the Expansion of Marriage

Both polygamists and gays should enjoy every right I do as a monogamous heterosexual human being. But I have no right to be married by the State, only the legal ability. To the extent anyone has a natural right to marry, it is as an extension of the right to contract. State marriage denies the freedom of contract by imposing its own terms for marriage and divorce, as well as through laws dictating how families may function. The State then rewards those who accept its jurisdiction by offering them tax-funded and legally mandated benefits; an estimated 1,100 federal benefits are currently available to heterosexual spouses. State jurisdiction over marriage should be denied not expanded.

So why the lurking urge to applaud gay marriage?

What Gay Marriage Seeks

The reason for my confused reaction is that gay marriage has three different objectives — two of which I accept, one of which I reject on principle. These objectives are:

1. The achievement of equal status in society. Gay people have such a deep, brutal history of being repressed that it is nothing but justice for them to announce themselves to society and do so with dignity. If this is what legal marriage means to gay couples, then it is largely symbolic and I have no interest in critiquing how people symbolize or express their love.
2. The ability to access the proper freedoms enjoyed by married couples. Gay couples seek State sanction in order to secure freedoms, such as the unquestioned ability to visit a hospitalized partner. Again these freedoms are best secured privately through such mechanisms as living wills and powers of attorney, as well as by changing social attitudes. But other than the amorphous harm of legitimizing the State, the freedoms sought harm no one.
3. The ability to demand entitlements. Such entitlements include welfare benefits, mandated health benefits from a working spouse’s employer, and state pension benefits. No one – heterosexual or gay – has the right to impose the cost of their personal choices on unconsenting third parties. And yet fully half the articles and commentaries I’ve read on gay marriage laud the extension of marriage “benefits.” This means a heavier burden on taxpayers and especially on individuals (such as employers) who must directly extend benefits. Libertarians should oppose expanding the injustice of entitlements and agitate instead for the end of entitlements to heterosexual couples.

To Legally Marry or Not

I did. I married into a deeply conservative family to whom a common-law relationship was anathema; nothing short of legal marriage could make me a family member. Thus I understand the craving many gay couples have to be publicly acknowledged rather than despised or dismissed. If they choose marriage as the only form of union that our society fully respects, then I cannot criticize them for a choice I made myself.

Again, however, marriage loses the status of a personal choice and becomes a political one whenever the cost of that decision is imposed on third parties. Thus my husband and I eschew all tax-funded benefits and urge others to do the same.

Any gay marriage that does not involve an entitlement grab deserves a congratulatory handful of rice. But the expansion of entitlements is the expansion of injustice and a step in the wrong direction.

If I  strictly follow libertarian principle, I think gay-marriage advocates should heed the example of polygamists; heterosexuals should as well. But if I follow my heart, I can only wish gay couples well.

The last thing government should get is more revenue.

FEE Timely Classic
“Higher Income Taxes Are Benign? It Just Ain’t So” by Jeb Bleckly and Joshua C. Hall

It’s a start.

FEE Timely Classic
“Just Say No to Farm Subsidies” by Lawrence W. Reed

Paul Mason is suing the British National Health Service (NHS) for “letting him grow.” Given the philosophy of modern Progressivism, I believe he is justified. Let me explain.

Mason once weighed about 890 pounds. Then he had gastric bypass surgery — paid for by the British taxpayers — to help cut his weight to the current 500 pounds.

He blames the NHS for his plight, claiming a medic gave him bad advice. (Mason once consumed about 20,000 calories a day.)

Our first reaction is to laugh, given that Mason chose to eat enough to feed ten men. “Shouldn’t he take responsibility?” we might ask.

Yet if we think how the Progressive mindset works, Mason’s lawsuit is perfectly logical. For more than a century Progressives (both here and abroad) have claimed that people should defer to the State not only for basic medical care but also for general direction in life.

There are government schools; government daycare centers; government food programs; “sin” taxes on tobacco and alcoholic beverages; restrictions on what we are permitted to eat, drink, and ingest; prohibitions on speech; rules on the kinds of pictures we can view; and all sorts of limits on what would be mutually agreed-on private transactions.

“Government Is Good”

In other words, government at all levels has an all-pervasive involvement in our lives. Some people believe that is a good thing, including person who has a “Government is Good” website. In a post titled “A Day in Your Life,” the blogger, Douglas J. Amy of Mount Holyoke College, writes:

6:30 a.m. You are awakened by your clock radio and listen for a few minutes to the news before getting up. But you can listen to your favorite station only because the Federal Communications Commission brings organization and coherence to our vast telecommunications system. It ensures, for example, that radio stations do not overlap and that stations signals are not interfered with by the numerous other devices – cell phones, satellite television, wireless computers, etc. – whose signals crowd our nation’s airwaves.

Amy goes on to say that our food is “safe” because of government inspections, we can drink the water because government makes it clean, government keeps us from stepping in dog droppings, government provides roads, government helps pay for the home you own, government makes sure cars are safe. Government, government, government.

Now he does acknowledge that government can violate our rights, but that is okay, too. Government will fix whatever is wrong, since an increase in the size, power, and scope of government makes us even freer. He writes:

Who comes to the rescue when our government violates our rights in these ways? To whom do Americans turn to revoke or remedy those actions and to make sure that they don’t happen again? The government.

It seems to me that if government has all of this authority and if government is the very sustenance of our lives, then Mason is within his rights to sue the NHS. After all, if government is as good as Amy claims it to be and if government agents should be making most of the decisions that affect us, then it was the government’s fault that Mason became immensely obese.

Thus if your life is not perfect, sue the government, since everyone knows it can and should bring perfection to society.

Worse by far, they’ve gotten PayPal, Visa, and MasterCard to stop handling donations to Wikileaks. Now, these payment-handling facilities are all “private” property. But they’ve all cut off Wikileaks, and all at the same time (all citing “terms of service” violations that Wikileaks’s previous activities don’t seem to have triggered).

A similar financial censorship was noted in October of last year, when New York Assemblyman Dov Hikind ganged up with twelve other New York City politicians and jawboned all the payment-handling companies to do the same thing to Holocaust Historian David Irving.

Whom else does Someone disapprove of? Well, just watch the No-Pay List. You’ll see them there first. The Washington Post? New York Times?