The Humble Libertarian original

CTV News Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says Canada will ban single-use plastic as early as 2021. When a reporter asks, "What are you and your family doing to cut back on plastics," he has one of the most amazing on-camera meltdowns of any politician I've ever seen. This clip gets funnier every time I re-watch it. Follow @thehuli

Because global warming: Anyone else feel like he's being a jerk?

An Inconvenient Truth: The US Government Is The Biggest Polluter On Earth. Fist Bump: The Art of Not Being Governed

By Eric Sharp: In the final episodes of Gurren Lagann the anti-spirals activate a humanity-destruction sequence that causes the moon to start to fall to earth. They do this because too many humans now populate the planet. Their will to evolve will eventually threaten the Universe . Previously the anti-spirals had forced all humans to live in underground chambers with very close population control. All this talk of the dangers of humanity and the need to control our growth and potential  for the good of the Universe is not unlike what some of the Left and State-Corporate Elite say about the planet. Prince What'shisface  (it's not important to remember the titles of royalty, we're classical liberals!) is reported as saying that he'd like to return to earth as a deadly virus in a next life so that he could help with over population. The Anti-Spiral forces that seek to supress or destroy humanity and other Spiral races are like the State and its...

By: Wes Messamore On Russia Today , Alex Jones discusses how global power players are working to orchestrate global control over the world's economy and natural resources to advance an agenda of radical population reduction and a return to pre-industrial feudalism. If you think this is over the top or hard to believe, I have only one question for you: Why? Wes Messamore , Editor in Chief, T H L Articles | Author's Page

Newt Gingrich is definitely regretting the commercial he once made with Democratic Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi. It was 2008 and Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project cut the commercial, which featured former House Speaker Newt Gingrich sitting on a couch with then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi. “We don’t always see eye-to-eye, do we, Newt?” said Pelosi. “No,” answered Gingrich, “but we do agree– our country must take action to address climate change.” Now, as Newt Gingrich seeks the nomination of a political party whose members are often skeptical of man-made global warming concerns, he’s not seeing so “eye-to-eye” with his adversary from across the partisan aisle any longer. Late last year, Gingrich called the commercial “The single dumbest thing I’ve done in years.” He even chucked a chapter of his book on the environment from a “conservative” perspective. So what changed? 2011-12 Newt finds the actions of 2008 Newt completely inexplicable, superlatively “dumb” even. Between then and ...

Reuters reports : Canada will formally withdraw from the Kyoto protocol on climate change, a government official told Reuters on Monday, making it the first nation to pull out. The official did not give details, but Environment Minister Peter Kent, who has said it was a mistake for Canada to have signed up for Kyoto, has scheduled a media availability for 5 p.m. (2200 GMT) in Ottawa. Wes Messamore , Editor in Chief, T H L Articles | Author's Page

Remember the "ClimateGate" scandal I covered two years ago ( here and here )? Here's Ed Morrissey's recap at HotAir.com : "Two years ago, a group calling itself FOIA.org dumped a treasure trove of e-mails from climate-change advocates and researchers that revealed abundant evidence of data manipulation and dishonest attempts to silence and discredit critics. Called “Climategate,” the exposure greatly damaged the standing of the scientists involved and their public statements. Now the same group has celebrated the second anniversary of the Climategate release with another release of 5,000 e-mails, which have only begun to be parsed by interested bloggers." So it's happening all over again , and this time the media has jumped on the story lightning fast. Here are just a couple of the earliest findings as bloggers sift through the cache of compromised emails: (3115) Mann: By the way, when is Tom C going to formally publish his roughly 1500 year rec...

These are exciting times to be alive for sure! Today, humanity has reached an unprecedented milestone at the later stage of a steeply upward-sloping population curve, the birth of the world's seven billionth baby (hat tip: memeorandum ) , or to be more precise, the first baby to put the total human population at seven billion. The Daily Caller reports : 'The United Nations estimates that the 7 billionth baby in the world will be born on Monday. The international agency has chosen Manila-born Danica May Camacho as the symbolic milestone baby, as first reported by the UK Guardian. National Geographic will devote a year long series to mark the occasion, complete with questions like “Are there too many people on the planet?” and “Can we feed seven billion of us?” Amid panic-laced prompts, the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) has called the milestone a victory for mankind, as people are living longer and children are surviving childhood — with the caveat being that the world nee...

What's especially satisfying about this news is how arrogant, how condescending, how incredibly smug the global warming alarmists have been all along in accusing the skeptics of being scientifically ignorant, backwards, hill billies clinging to our Bibles along with our belief in a flat world held up by pillars on the backs of elephants. The way many of them painted us, we would confine Galileo to his house all over again if he were alive today. I ask the climate alarmists now, what do you say to these new NASA data? How do you respond to these observable data and their implications, you who claim to represent science? You know the scientific method has more steps to it than just hypothesis, right? Ask any fourth grader. You've actually got to do some observation of the real world. You've got to take measurements. You've got to test the observed results against your hypothesis to see if it was correct... and your models were incorrect. No, that's not the opinion o...

Matt Hurtt makes a great point about the Republicans' bill to repeal Washington's ban on incandescent bulbs in favor of those ugly ones that take forever to turn on, send out some wavelength of light that literally hurts my brain, and make you look green and awful in photos. Even though the Republicans' bill does the right thing in telling Americans we don't have to buy these any more, it goes a step further and tells us individual states aren't allowed to make laws regulating light bulbs. Now I agree that individual states shouldn't pass such regulations for the same reason I don't think Washington should, but that is a battle to be fought in each individual state according to that state's constitution, not in Washington. Congress, you are overreaching again, even when you're trying to remedy past overreaches. Gah, it's frustrating! Wes Messamore , Editor in Chief, T H L Articles | Author's Page

So according to ThinkProgress , a top climate scientist has said that "it is irresponsible not to mention climate change" in connection with the devastating storms that rampaged through southern states this week (hat tip: memeorandum ) . Just like the birthers, climate alarmists will interpret anything and everything as validating their dogma. Lots of storms? Must be global "climate change" --as if devastating storms did not exist prior to the Industrial Revolution. Earthquake hits Haiti? Yeah, celebrity climate alarmist Danny Glover pinned that one on global warming. It's getting warmer? Global warming. It's getting colder ? Global warming-- er-- climate change-- yeah-- that's it! Climate change! Remember that earlier this week in my discussion of the "After-Birther" movement I wrote: That is the hallmark of a true "wingnut," "barking moonbat," or whatever other dysphemism you want to use for someone who has decid...

This one is an oldie, but a goodie. If you haven't seen it, you absolutely have to. If you have, you should share it with a friend! Penn and Teller have an actor go around describing H20 "with the vocabulary and tone of environmental hysteria," and successfully getting people to sign a petition banning it: Wes Messamore , Editor in Chief, T H L Articles | Author's Page

Affirming the old aphorism that actions speak louder than words, the Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta asserted that “the revolution consists more in deeds than words.” Malatesta saw that “each time a spontaneous movement of the people erupts,” there is an opportunity for progress toward society without authority. A similar idea is encapsulated in the Samuel E. Konkin III’s notion of the “counter economy,” all of that economic activity that exists in defiance of the state’s hierarchical control. Where the net results of people working within real market relationships — arrangements free from outside coercion — are adaptability and local-community strength, the product of hierarchy and compulsion is irresponsibility. Read the rest of David D'Amato's article at The Center for a Stateless Society . James Tuttle , Regular Columnist, T H L Articles | Author's Page | Website

I’m frequently asked how an anarchist society would deal with things like pollution and other kinds of corporate malfeasance in the absence of a regulatory state. One remedy commonly put forward by market anarchists is tort liability, enforced by local juries or arbitration services. For example, a corporation that spilled large quantities of gasoline and polluted the groundwater would be sued by the farmers whose wells were affected. Libertarian writer Don Boudreaux ( “Demsetz on the Costs of Markets,” Cafe Hayek, Jan. 21) cites economist Harold Demsetz to the effect that property rights (like the right to clean air) may go unprotected in a free market because protection costs too much. The transaction costs of defining the property rights, assigning a market value to them, and identifying and punishing violations, are simply more than it’s worth to those who are protected. If this is the case, Boudreaux’s argument essentially mirrors that of progressives: That the prevention of pol...

What you may not know is that biodiesel, despite the tree-hugging market appeal of its promoters, is being cornered by a bunch of monopolists as predatory as J.D. Rockefeller ever dreamed of being. According to Adam Schwartz, head of the Green Guild Biodiesel Cooperative (“ Nothing Grows from the Top Down ,” Green Guild Biodiesel, June 20, 2010), biodiesel production is being consolidated in the control of the big producers and the soybean industry. “In Virginia new legislation made it illegal to transport vegetable oil without a commercial license, essentially forcing an already marginalized biodiesel community to go completely underground.” I hear frequently from a doctoral student named Keith Taylor, who’s researching electrical power cooperatives and decentralized models for developing wind power. He’s sent me quite a bit of material, over the past year or so, on the extent to which government “alternative energy” policy systematically privileges large-scale, conventional corpo...

This post could be entitled, “So many bad decisions, so little time,” but let’s have some fun and turn it into a contest. Which bone-headed decision by a local government best exemplifies mindless bureaucracy, politically correct nonsense, and government waste? Contestant Number One is an officer of the Baltimore County Natural Resources Police , who fined two men $90 each for the vicious, horrible, nasty crime of … (please don’t faint) … rescuing a deer. Yes, your eyes do not deceive you. Two hardened criminals used an inflatable raft to free a helpless animal, but they flouted the law by not wearing life jackets. Since I already did a blog post about a man being fined for rescuing a wounded deer , I guess the moral of the story is that bureaucrats don’t like Bambi. Contestant Number Two is ... Read the rest of Dan Mitchell's essay at Cato-At-Liberty.org Daniel J. Mitchell is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute Filed by Grant Davies , Regular Columnist, T H L Artic...

Bjorn Lomborg is a self-described socialist and Director of the Copenhagen Consensus Centre, an institution that seeks to view social justice at an objective economics level - guiding national governments and policy makers to better understand the exact good that different proposed solutions can produce per dollar. A few years ago, Lomborg became an instant right-wing media darling for his book, Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming . But I'm not sure any of these pundits actually read the book, because Lomborg is clear about his socialistic outlook, and his argument is merely one of economic priorities. Lomborg just as quickly became the whipping boy for left-wing vitriol - those who believed he was simply ignoring science. I'm quite certain none of these pundits read the book. Because when Lomborg released his latest work regarding the same issue, Smart Solutions to Climate Change: Comparing Costs and Benefits , people went berserk. "Oh, n...

I intend to ask the question, "Is it libertarian to dumpster dive?" -dumpster diving being the activity of retrieving food products from dumpsters or grocers and feeding them to people that need it. The first obvious question is whether the grocer still possesses and owns the food upon placing it in the dumpster. Well? There are two sides to this. On one hand, the owner of the dumpster would in concrete terms have ownership of the food and any other refuse in the dumpster. But on the other hand, by discarding materials into the dumpster the grocer has arguably discharged ownership of the refuse. A case can be made for the food being ethically retrievable from a property rights standpoint. If we accept this premise, then there are multiple organizations that can be embraced into the libertarian fold. An excellent example of this is Food Not Bombs . As quoted from their website homepage: " Food Not Bombs shares free vegan and vegetarian meals with the hungry in over 1,0...

With Earth Hour 2010, which is to say: "anti-poor, anti-freedom, anti-humanity, anti-progress, anti-happiness hour 2010" just a day away , let's review what Earth Hour really means: Anti-poor: It is anti-poor because its organizers support strict, coercive carbon mitigation policies which will destroy the ability of the third world poor to develop and become affluent. It's easy and fun to sit in the dark for an hour with friends when you know you can turn the lights back on, but you're being incredibly dense, insensitive, and cruel to the people of the world without your advantages, who have a dream of developing and becoming affluent like you. Those people often sit in darkness anyway, not by choice, but because of substandard power systems and intense poverty. They live in countries that need to industrialize, that need to burn fossil fuels, that need to use energy in order to develop. The carbon-regulatory schemes at issue with the Earth Hour supporters, will...