• What's Wrong With Woodrow Wilson? Radley Balko: Reason Magazine articles and blog posts. (2010-10-11). A: He was a fucking fascist, that’s what’s wrong. (Linked Monday 2010-10-11.)

• Modesto Police Shoot Francisco Moran and Rita Elias. Modesto Anarcho!'s MySpace Blog (2010-10-04). On Friday night, Rita Elias, 31, died after off-duty sheriff’s detective Kari Abbey, shot and killed her after an hour long argument. Kari Abbey, a 6 year veteran to the force, and a detective of four… (Linked Monday 2010-10-11.)

• Under Surveillance America. Darian Worden, Center for a Stateless Society (2010-09-16). Federal Bureau of Investigation files indicate that Ernest Withers, prominent photographer of 1960s Civil Rights activism, was also a federal informant. According to the Washington Post, he provided photographs, scheduling information and biographical sketches on Civil Rights leaders to the FBI. Whether Withers was trying to cash in on information… (Linked Tuesday 2010-10-12.)

• Nothing new under the sun. John Markley, The Superfluous Man (2010-10-06). Contemporary American politics makes a great deal more sense in light of the realization that Barack Obama’s most devoted fans and fiercest critics are united by a shared delusion: the belief that Obama is really, really interesting.How this manifests among his supporters is apparent enough in the starry-eyed adulation he… (Linked Tuesday 2010-10-12.)

• Homesteading in Haiti: Very Adverse Possession. Jesse Walker, Jesse Walker: Reason Magazine articles and blog posts. (2010-10-12). Emily Troutman reports from the hills near Port-au-Prince: Six months ago, this land was nothing but crickets in the grass. Now, it's Haiti's new frontier, a landscape of squatters whose greatest hope is a home of their own. Gray and blue shacks and shanties extend for miles. Small gardens and… (Linked Tuesday 2010-10-12.)

• Event: The Prospects and Ethics of Political Reform. justino, DFW Alliance of the Libertarian Left (2010-09-27). What: As we near election time, candidates for office will inevitably present themselves as an alternative to the status quo that plagues us. But what types of reform in practice, if any, are consistent with a libertarian political philosophy? The first article we will study is Ron Paul's "My Plan… (Linked Tuesday 2010-10-12.)

• Event: !!!@@e2;20ac;2dc;For the Bible Tells Me So' Movie. justino, DFW Alliance of the Libertarian Left (2010-09-22). What: 1919 Hemphill, a local DIY collective, is hosting a screening of the documentary For the Bible Tells Me So (2007) as part of its long-time movie series Conscientious Projector. A recipient of numerous international awards, the film documents the turmoil Christian families with a gay child face and "sometimes… (Linked Tuesday 2010-10-12.)

• Grieving Student Suspected of Using Marijuana Reinstated. DFW Alliance of the Libertarian Left (2010-10-12). Narco-Statism Vs. Compassion and Human Decency (Cont’d) (Linked Tuesday 2010-10-12.)

• Getting Away With Murder. Center for a Stateless Society (2010-10-12). Cops are here to keep us safe. (Cont’d) (Linked Tuesday 2010-10-12.)

• New Orleans: Victim of Government Neglect? William L. Anderson, The Freeman | Ideas On Liberty (2010-08-31). Five years ago Hurricane Katrina, a massive Category 3 storm, hit the Gulf Coast region, destroying property, killing nearly 2,000 people, and leaving damage that still dots the landscape. Although the brunt of the storm hit the Mississippi coast, Katrina is best-known for the flooding of New Orleans, which happened… (Linked Saturday 2010-09-04.)

• Turking! The idea and some implications. Jed, Anomalous Presumptions (2010-08-26). I recently read an edited collection of five stories, Metatropolis; the stories are set in a common world the authors developed together. This is a near future in which nation state authority has eroded and in which new social processes have grown up and have a big role in making… (Linked Saturday 2010-09-04.)

• The Golden Age of Comic Books. Brian Doherty, Brian Doherty: Reason Magazine articles and blog posts. (2010-08-30). Ben Schwartz's edited volume The Best American Comics Criticism is the first attempt to anthologize and build a canon of short-form history, journalism, and criticism about comics, and it does a fine job. It also self-consciously marks the beginning of a fresh era in acceptance and achievement for non-genre works… (Linked Saturday 2010-09-04.)

• Measuring Blood on Hands in the Wikileaks Controversy. Brian Doherty, Brian Doherty: Reason Magazine articles and blog posts. (2010-08-06). Tom Englehardt questions Joint Chief of Staff Chair Mike Mullen's accusations that Wikileaks has blood on their hands because info they leaked could lead people to kill Afghan informants or American soliders. Some excerpts on why Mullen might not be the best spokesman for that position of scrupulous moral responsibility… (Linked Saturday 2010-09-04.)

• Noise Complaint Leads to Police Shooting, Killing 17-Year-Old. Radley Balko, Radley Balko: Reason Magazine articles and blog posts. (2010-09-03). Last Sunday night, police in Morganton, North Carolina shot and killed 17-year-old Michael Sipes. The officers were responding to a noise complaint called in by a neighbor in the mobile home park where Sipes lived. His mother says there were three children in the home on the night Sipes was… (Linked Saturday 2010-09-04.)

• Three Shalt Thou Count. Roderick, Austro-Athenian Empire (2010-08-30). The debates in the comments section of my Koch post have gotten me thinking about the different ways in which vulgar libertarianism operates. I think there are three. 1) First, there's the use of libertarian slogans as mere rhetorical covering for corporatist policies. This kind of vulgar libertarianism is standard… (Linked Monday 2010-08-30.)

• C4SS in the MSM. Roderick, Austro-Athenian Empire (2010-08-30). Congratulations to Ross Kenyon, whose latest C4SS piece has been picked up by the Christian Science Monitor! (Linked Monday 2010-08-30.)

• The Cold, Crisp Taste of Koch. Jesse Walker, Jesse Walker: Reason Magazine articles and blog posts. (2010-08-31). From Frank Rich's rehash of Jane Mayer's recent hit piece on the philanthropizin' oilmen Charles and David Koch: When David Koch ran to the right of Reagan as vice president on the 1980 Libertarian ticket (it polled 1 percent), his campaign called for the abolition not just of Social Security,… (Linked Tuesday 2010-08-31.)

• Why does the Infrastructurist hate libertarians so much? rationalitate, Market Urbanism (2010-08-25). by Stephen Smith Among urban planners, libertarianism gets a pretty bad rap. Melissa Lafsky at the Infrastructurist goes so far as to call libertarianism "an enemy of infrastructure," and dismisses entirely the idea that private industry can build infrastructure with a single hyperlink – to a poorly-written article on New Zealand's… (Linked Tuesday 2010-08-31.)

• Argumentum ad un-Americanum. Will Wilkinson, Will Wilkinson (2010-08-27). This Forbes column by Yaron Brook and Don Watkins arguing that the government should stop subsidizing homeownership was skipping along predictably but just fine until... When the government encourages homeownership, the story goes, it strengthens individuals and communities and thereby fosters the American Dream. They're wrong. A government crusade to… (Linked Tuesday 2010-08-31.)

• Why Do Futurists Get So Much Wrong? Steven Horwitz, The Freeman | Ideas On Liberty (2010-08-25). The Austrian economist Ludwig Lachmann once walked into the colloquium room at New York University, where the blackboard displayed this quotation: "When it comes to the future, one word says it all: You never know. – Y. Berra." Having built much of his economics on the unknowability of the future,… (Linked Tuesday 2010-08-31.)

• Scary scary news scary! admin, This Modern World (2010-08-31). Scary scary news scary! (Linked Tuesday 2010-08-31.)

• this thought experiment just got way too awesome. Dinosaur Comics (2010-04-20). archive – contact – sexy exciting merchandise – what happened – search – about!!!@@e2;2020;90; previousApril 20th, 2010nextApril 20th, 2010: I just found out that Stanford’s marching band turned their tubas into Dinosaur Comics to help win a Battle of the Bands and this is what I have to say to… (Linked Wednesday 2010-04-21.)

• Help Corvus help the Kate Sharpley Library. Shawn P. Wilbur, Out of the Libertarian Labyrinth (2010-04-16). I’ve got a lot to say, sometime soon, about mutual-aid economies and the power of small, periodic support for small projects, but, for once, let’s get the practice out there in front of the theory. Despite my tendency to be into a bit of everything all the time, the heart… (Linked Thursday 2010-04-22.)

• !!!@@e2;20ac;2dc;Infographic', by Phil Gyford. John Gruber, Daring Fireball (2010-04-09). Zing.  â˜…  (Linked Thursday 2010-04-22.)

• Malfunction ... Malfunction ... Roderick, Austro-Athenian Empire (2010-04-22). Mary Matalin on CNN's Campbell Brown show just now, on the subject of marijuana: My libertarian sense says let's regulate it. (Linked Friday 2010-04-23.)

• The Washington-Wall Street Kabuki Dance. The Freeman | Ideas On Liberty (2010-04-23). Excellent work in the latest from Sheldon Richman: “When I watch the public furor over the ruling party's attempt to ‘toughen’ regulations on the financial industry, I get the same feeling I often have in a theater: Good show but it's not real. … If you have doubts about any of this, imagine some top Wall Street operator calling for elimination of the Federal Reserve System and the banking cartel it administers. Imagine him endorsing repeal of all federal and state banking regulations and their replacement with free banking and market-based money. Imagine him testifying on behalf of an end to all implicit guarantees, bailout promises, and the "too big to fail" doctrine. If you can't imagine it you have begun to grasp the nature of the actual political economy in which we live.” Sheldon’s column has also been reprinted in this weekend’s CounterPunch. (Congrats!) (Linked Friday 2010-04-23.)

• The Palinites and the Paulians. Jesse Walker, Jesse Walker: Reason Magazine articles and blog posts. (2010-04-20). The biggest (though not the only) limit to last week's CBS/New York Times Tea Party survey is that it didn't distinguish the movement's armchair sympathizers from the people who actually go out and join the rallies. Politico and Edison Research have filled part of that gap by polling the participants… (Linked Friday 2010-04-23.)

New U.S. $100 Even Uglier. Daring Fireball (2010-04-22):

Why are we making our money ugly? We're ruining one of the greatest visual brands in history.  â˜… 

Good lord.

John Gruber, linking the story at Daring Fireball, asks “Why are we [sic] making our money ugly?” I don’t think it’s hard to explain. The answer is that “we” (you and I) aren’t doing anything to the U.S. Federal Reserve notes, because we don’t design them and we don’t have any meaningful market choice about what kind of money to use, either. The “visual brand” here is a brand in a completely uncompetitive market.

The people who do exercise effective choice over the design of U.S. government monopoly money (Treasury, the Fed, and the Secret Service) have no need to work to attract customers; their work is solely concerned with confining customers. Hence they have no incentive to be concerned with keeping their “visual brand” strong or attractive; the incentives point towards just making it as complicated and inelegant as possible, in order to make the design hard to counterfeit. Money that was produced in a competitive market, and which relied on customer choice rather than government fiat as its basis for value, has typically been attractive and well-designed.