Those poor uncivilized rubes.  They should know that detaining people without charge is the mark of enlightened societies.  Luckily, our noble officials are in the process of educating the finer points of a sophisticated society to the Afghan people.

 Here are some of the highlights that I found interesting.

Libertarians have the “most masculine style brains.”  They are more cerebral than both liberals and conservatives with liberals being the most feminine.  “We used Simon Baron-Cohen’s measures of “empathizing” (on which women tend to score higher) and “systemizing”, which refers to “the drive to analyze the variables in a system, and to derive the underlying rules that govern the behavior of the system.” Men tend to score higher on this variable.”

Libertarians also scored the highest on a crude IQ test.  Libertarians are also “more than liberals or conservatives, have the capacity to reason their way to their ideology.”  This makes total sense to me, both liberals and conservatives have so many contradictions in their own respective ideologies that they appear to me to be pure pragmatists with no underlying belief system that I can tell. Libertarian’s arguments from both the utilitarian side and the natural rights moral approach are completely superior to anything liberals and conservatives can offer.  This is why liberals and conservatives can’t reason through their own ideology because to do so would mean that they would have to confront the contradictions that they espouse.  The current political scene and media make this situation much worse and make conservative and liberal ideology almost meaningless.  Conservatives supposedly love the American Constitution but also wholeheartedly embrace the patriot act, undeclared wars, and a king like executive.  Liberals supposedly care about the weak and the poor but have no clue or don’t care how government welfare has been completely destructive to those groups. 

Libertarians when “asked directly, using a series of standard psychological measures available at YourMorals.org, they reported being less neurotic, less disgusted, and less empathic, compared to liberals and conservatives, while also reporting a greater need for cognition and systematic understanding of the world.”  Libertarians also responded with more “rational/utilitarian style.” “Libertarians tended to do better on logic problems that included answers designed to fool more intuitive thinkers.”  This makes sense to me.  To be a libertarian at all means that you have to seek at knowledge and consciously assimilate ideas that you never hear from the main stream.  This would imply that they, by seeking out and discovering libertarianism in the first place are trying to understand reality in a logical way.

Here is the reason page where I found out about the article.  It is definitely worth the read. It is also a useful reference to understanding the differences between, liberals, conservatives, and libertarians.

Lastly, from a personal observation, libertarians have by far the best sense of humor.  Liberals and conservatives take themselves way to seriously.  This is obvious in political discussion with both groups but they do the same thing in life as well from my observations.  For example, conservatives are really defensive about their American greatness ideology.  The same is true with liberals and the welfare state.  Try to question either of these, like saying maybe not every war we have been in has been a good idea or that maybe the welfare state does not work, and you are met with a emotionally charged response more often than not. Libertarians on the other hand are very comfortable in their ideology.  They do not hold irrational ideas about government sacred and usually have a firm logical understanding of the world that can be explained very effectively.  People that are comfortable with themselves are usually more laid back than those who are not.  For proof of what a great sense of humor libertarians have, just read the comments bellow the reason article I linked to.  I don’t think you find such good fun comments under a article by slate or the national review.

I think Bitcoins are pretty cool.  In short, bit-coins are a digital online currency.  There is much debate among libertarians whether they fall into the category of “real money” but they are far better than Federal Reserve notes which  don’t really fall into the real money category either.  Bit-coins have been used on websites like silkroad, which largely sell illegal merchandise like drugs.  This can be done because bit-coins are so hard to trace.  The reason I like bit-coins the most is because it allows people to use currency that is outside the privately controlled Federal Reserve system.  Its use alone is a protest against that system.

Here is a short video explaining bitcoins.

QE3 was announced last week.  Like usual, most Austrians economists predicted this because they also predicted that the first two would not work.  As predicted, the Federal Reserve is going to try it again. This one will not work either.  Tom woods explains how Austrian Business Cycle theory works and how monetary stimulus is so damaging to the economy.  If you need to know one thing about Austrian economics, this is it.  I wish I could get Ben Bernanke would watch this.

It is political season and it seems that people like to talk about politics. For liberty minded people, this may be a good opportunity to educate people when the conversation turns into politics.  From my experience, you will have trouble changing their minds from a brief conversation but you will at least have the time to expose people to new ideas.  Hopefully this will encourage people in the future to research these ideas and maybe open their minds.  They might not change their minds by next election cycle but this is a long term intellectual battle, just getting these ideas out there is a positive thing, especially considering most people have probably not heard of any of them.  I think this guy does a pretty good job at presenting his case in what seems like a normal guy on the street type conversation.

 Here is Ron Paul talking to people in the Libertarian Party. 

 

 Though, I don’t think the libertarian party is the answer to our problems, he makes some interesting points and I often use strategies that Ron Paul talks about in conversation.  Most importantly in my opinion is that libertarians have common ground with both the left and the right on a lot of issues.  I think if we start with this common ground and then point out the logical inconsistencies in their own ideology and whatever political leaders they support.  This is pretty easy.  If the person is a liberal, they should support things like civil liberties and reducing the warfare state.  I then point out that the Democrats have vastly increased the surveillance state and the warfare state.  If the person is a conservative, I point that every time Republicans have been elected to office, they have vastly increased the size of government.  I also point out that the current Republican presidential candidate has supported bail outs, universal health care, and stricter gun control laws.  Even the supposed conservative Paul Ryan has supported TARP, the auto company bail outs, no child left behind, the vast expansion of medicare under Bush.

Here is Edward Griffon talking about how to need to get our people in power.  I agree.

I think long term the future is bright.  The people in the liberty movement are by far the most dedicated and knowledgeable group of people I have ever met.  Let us keep finding other member of the remenant and continue the intellectual battle for liberty in our time.

One of the first reasons that people think of when talking about whether or not we need a large federal government (or global government for that matter) is the environment. Even self described libertarians often have trouble answering this question because much of the main stream libertarian publications and think tanks have avoided this for some time. Well, the Austro-libertarians have come to the rescue again and describe how we can have a much cleaner environment with absolutely no regulation at all. The case for this is actually pretty simple, that law, not regulation, protects people from aggressive action by others. Pollution is an aggressive action (it harms either you or your property). It therefore follows that the law should be used to protect people from such action.

If a company pollutes a river, people downstream have a right to claim damages. The reason that this was not often done in the past was because large corporations often used lobbyists to change liability laws to protect themselves against such damage suits from being filed. More regulation is just a very poor Band-Aid that tries to regulate away the damage causing chemicals in the water by making them less toxic but toxic is still toxic, even if it is a lesser degree. The real answer is to hold companies and individuals completely liable for any contamination in the water supply. The threat of lawsuits will ensure the river will stay much cleaner but regulation has the opposite effect, it simply lets the industrial company get away with a certain amount of pollution.

Walter Block explains (skip the add)

While both on the left and the right blame each other for the tragedy in Colorado it seems only the Libertarians have a level head when such tragedy’s occur. Here is a good video from Reason about the topic.