Libertarian newsfeeds

I just updated my blog template, moving around the headline sections on the right. I've carried Lew Rockwell headlines since I started this blog. Recently I learned that LewRockwell.com carries weekly, monthly, and annual top ten article pages. Since I don't have time to read every single LRC daily article (alas), these are pretty useful to me. And since I am a programmer, I knew how to create my own headline newsfeeds off of these pages.

So now my sidebar carries the Lew Rockwell weekly top ten most popular headlines. The daily headlines are down lower.

And I should mention that over time I've created a lot of such newsfeeds that might be of interest to libertarian-minded, liberty-minded, or anarcho-capitalist-minded people. You can read these feeds with feed reading software such as Google Reader, which I highly recommend. Here's a list:

• This blog


• This blog's comments


• My shared items feed from Google Reader, bringing you frequent updates of items I found interesting and relevant to the liberty-minded. And here it is as a webpage.


• A.B. Dada's comments on Slashdot


• John Stossel's syndicated columns


• Lew Rockwell monthly ten most popular articles


• Lew Rockwell weekly ten most popular articles


• Lew Rockwell yearly ten most popular articles (yes, you'll have to wait a long time for this one to update to something new :) )


• Lysander's Ghost, a friend of mine who helped me see that God required me to have a righteous attitude toward "public policy"


• Strike the Root


• The Chalcedon Foundation, a religious institution calling for self-government and voluntary submission to God


• Walter Williams columns: Walter Williams is a brilliant minarchist economist. You may have often heard him substitute for Rush Limbaugh on his radio program. Williams is responsible for teaching me that governments do not get a pass to break God's laws such as Thou Shalt Not Steal.


• Thomas Sowell columns: Sowell is another bright minarchist economist. He's a little more "conservative" and a little less "libertarian" than Williams

Read "The Right to Ignore the State"

The Right to Ignore the State, by Herbert Spencer, is tough reading (Spencer died in 1903). It takes work to get through what it says, assembling the meaning of complex sentences from difficult words, and then following the train of logic from sentence to sentence.

But I found that Spencer said, eloquently and intelligently, exactly what I believe to be true.

Totalitarians looking for another name

Leftist politicians are abandoning the word "liberal" in favor of the word "progressive." Of course, they pretend they are fighting to restore the original definition of "liberal," which meant being in favor of freedom, which they definitely are not. But as we know, it's politically expedient to claim that things which are not freedom and liberty actually are freedom and liberty. Like democracy, for example.

I know a bunch of libertarians who would love to have the word back. That's what it used to mean. Of course, it's truly bizarre to see advocates of religious faith in government like Hillary Clinton pretend to care that liberal doesn't mean liberty anymore.

I'm fine with them labelling themselves progressives. I just hope there will always be an extremely large number of people like me around to point out that the "progress" that they want is totalitarian. What this world does NOT need is just the "right" leaders in charge so that we can finally make "progress." True progress would be liberty.

A couple of years ago my local city politics had a group calling itself "Moving [our city] Forward." I opposed it, of course. What utter dreck! You'll never hear a politician who doesn't say things along the lines of "a vote for me is a vote for moving forward; I just think we need to move forward," etc.

Free human beings don't define "moving forward" like a collective, like a communist nation, like the Borg. The only meaningful definition of "progress" at the government level is the progressive elimination of government itself. Want to make progress today? Call one of your agents in government and tell them to stop doing anything, and especially to stop taking money from your neighbors and telling them what they can and cannot do. And convince your neighbors to do the same. Help build a world where we don't gladly hand out the reigns of tyranny to people who promise to make the most "progress." That would be a world where anyone who stands up and says "put me in charge, I'll help us make progress" doesn't get a single vote.