Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

Issue 1200! I guess that’s some sort of landmark. The Libertarian Enterprise has outlasted many good publications. The oldest I’m aware of is the Foundation for Economic Education The Freeman, which lives on on FEE’s web site. Leonard Reed founded FEE in 1946, making it the oldest still extant libertarian organization I know of. The Mont Pelerin Society was founded a year later at a conference organized by Friedrich Von Hayek.

In This Issue

Speaking of Keynesian calories, as we were in this week’s cartoon, and of war (as in our motto), L. Neil Smith on Economic Genocide. How many human life equivalents have been obliterated by the dead hands of taxation and regulation since the Constitution was ratified? And why we don’t have flying cars or a cure for cancer.

Antônio F. Oliveira continues his series on AI and social media, and how they are used to control and stifle debate. While the article concentrates on Brazil, folks all over the world can learn from this series.

Sean Gangol reviews an episode of Adam Ruins Everything on gun control. It appears the series is accurately titled.

You can have “equity”, says Sarah A. Hoyt, but you might get some side effects with it.

Events

Your event here? Let your editor know!

Links! Have we got Links!

Time wounds all heels Dept.: former congresscreature Pat Schroeder (D-Denver), and occasional foil for L. Neil Smith, dead at 82. Here was a congressthing who was perfectly willing to draft a young woman and hand her an M-16 so she could shoot Serbians, or whomever Schroeder told her to shoot, but would prohibit that same young woman the use of a .38 revolver to defender herself against the rapists who infested (and continue to infest) Denver.

Post-Decency Politics: House Democrats Use Hearing to Attack Both Free Speech and a Free Press. From Jonathan Turley. (There’s nothing new about Democrats attacking free speech; see next week.)

Fatherless U.S.: A Nation in Decline “But, in all of that incompetence and dysfunction, one thing stands out as the most telling, the most impactful development in the decline of the U.S. – the destruction of the family and the sidelining of fathers.”

Biden to punish victims of crime by making it harder for them to acquire the means of self defense. Joe Biden to unveil executive order to crack down on law-breaking gun sellers: Merrick Garland, the attorney general, tasked with moving the country ‘as close to universal background checks as possible’. According to the article, “There will be an effort to hold the gun industry accountable by naming and shaming federally licensed firearms dealers who are violating the law.” Gee, I always thought that the proper remedy for violating the law was successful prosecution.

And I suspect that this administration will be surprised to learn that the gun culture is not as susceptible to cancel culture tactics as some other people might be. But the real target here isn’t the gun culture per se. It’s people who are on the edge of joining it: single moms who fear (not unreasonably) for their lives and are just beginning to explore their options.

The style of the new anti-speech Democrat is clear: define all government critics as lacking standing to criticize, impugn their prior opinions and associations, imply that all their beliefs are conspiracy theory, define their lack of faith in the FBI’s judgment as treasonous, and declare their motivation to be financial. Lastly, when they invoke common constitutional rights, make a note that their activities exist in an uncovered carve-out.

This is the playbook. Future witnesses should expect the same. And I was wrong: we definitely should not get used to it.

— Matt Taibbi, In FBI Case, the First Amendment Takes Another Bizarre Hit: The same Democratic minority staff that trashed the First Amendment in last week’s Twitter Files hearings put something amazing in writing in a parallel case

How Rising Tuition Poked a Hole in the College Bubble: While the population has grown, the number of college students has declined in the past decade. I suspect that wokery, cancel culture and just plain idiocy might have had something to do with it as well.