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I’ve alluded to the regulatory house of cards before, specifically with regard to net neutrality. The basic idea is one of unintended consequences: starting from a state of freedom, the government sees a problem real or imagined and tries to fix it by fiat. Of course, this perverts incentives and makes for new problems, which [...]
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The strength of the Protestant reformation was the axe it applied to contemporary Catholic doctrine. One of the many categories to get the axe was the sacraments. Catholics had a nice round list of seven, several of which are nowhere spoken of in the Bible. But one in particular got thrown out perhaps too hastily, one whose consequences are now coming to bear in the modern American political scene: marriage…
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Ni Dieu Ni Maître – “Neither God Nor Master” – has become a trendy slogan among anarchists. The idea is that the self is the final authority, that it has an obligation to submit itself to no authority, religious or political. There indeed seems to be a sentiment that religious devotion is incompatible with liberty. Submission to the state, the logic goes, is only a small step to a mind accustomed to submission to God. Is it such a small step, though, as if the authority of God were essentially the same as the authority of men but on a grander scale?…