Liberty and Letters

Thoughts on the History and Literature of Freedom
Profile picture
  • B.K. Marcus

House of Refuge: Fiction for a Future of Freedom Sep 15, 2014

Today Liberty.me adds Mike DiBaggio's award-winning novella House of Refuge to the Library. I was very excited by the opportunity to release a Liberty.me edition of this story, as my editorial preface should make clear: Editorial Preface by B.K. Marcus I became a devotee of seasteading — the creation of autonomous communities out at sea — during the summer solstice of 2014, while seated in the Austin Music Hall, surrounded by hipsters half my age. We were at Voice & Exit, an event, “built around a simple idea: human flourishing.” The hipsters were waiting, I suspect, for the liberty-minded lectures...

By B.K. Marcus Vote21 5

Prisoner of Liberty Aug 18, 2014

I love and long for liberty, but I'm not always in love with libertarianism. I don't mean libertarians themselves. I love libertarians. I just find the subject of liberty doesn't sustain me, and there's so much else in the world of ideas worth thinking about. But once you're educated in even just a little bit of economic theory and a bit of the thinking of our tradition, it becomes very difficult to talk to non-libertarians, because almost any topic will lead to their saying something shallow or ignorant about the problems of the world or, worse, what they imagine the...

By B.K. Marcus Vote12 2

Hedy Lamarr Bet on the Wrong Horse Aug 11, 2014

"Hedy stands naked in a field. She looks off-camera in dismay as her horse gallops away with the clothes she had draped over its back to take a dip in a woodland pond." That's the opening line of my article "Putting Hedy Lamarr on Hold," originally featured in the Freeman. The article is about the little-known story around a US patent awarded on this day in 1942 to "the Ecstasy Girl," actress Hedy Lamarr (and avant-garde composer George Antheil) for their "Secret Communications System," an early technique of frequency-hopping spread spectrum that later became the basis for the wireless Internet....

By B.K. Marcus Vote9 0

Are Seasteaders Politically Agnostic? Aug 6, 2014

Since hearing Joe Quirk, director of communications for the Seasteading Institute, speak at Voice & Exit in Austin last June, I have become very excited about the creation of autonomous communities out at sea. I think seasteads may be the future of freedom and innovation, a way to bring greater health and wealth to humanity as a whole, and greater liberty to individuals. Pursuing these goals is, as I see it, the positive agenda of libertarianism. So is seasteading fundamentally libertarian? The folks over at the Seasteading Institute say no. [Read the rest at bkmarcus.com.]

By B.K. Marcus Vote0 2

Price Theory a la Rupert Murdoch Jul 16, 2014

The New York Times informs us that Rupert Murdoch is trying to buy Time Warner, and I'm reminded of an earlier buying spree. Murdoch was buying up online properties in the mid 1990s, trying to do with the newly commercial Internet what he had done with FOX television during the previous ten years or so. One of his new acquisitions was a gaming company here in Charlottesville. My friend and I became the two "web guys" for the company. It was my first full-time job in the private sector. When I was discussing my Freeman laugh-track article with Paul Cantor...

By B.K. Marcus Vote3 0

Anarchist Shadow Holiday Jul 4, 2014

I don't celebrate their holiday. What I celebrate is a different holiday that happens to have the same name and takes place on the same date.

By B.K. Marcus Vote19 6

On Learning How to Learn: Classical Education and the Trivium Jul 1, 2014

In July, Liberty.me is bringing you new resources on homeschooling and parenting within the tradition of liberty. Here is an introduction to the lost tools of learning — the Trivium and classical education.

By B.K. Marcus Vote18 3

Class War in the Time of Robin Hood Jun 16, 2014

Robin Hood is the personification of class conflict, but the classes in conflict don’t neatly fit the Marxist theory. They do, however, fit the older, now mostly forgotten libertarian class theory of French and American classical liberals.

By B.K. Marcus Vote4 3

When Evil Institutions Do Good Things: The FCC’s PTAR Law Jun 12, 2014

I loved Mary Tyler Moore, and I didn't care so much for Lawrence Welk, but what I really love is peaceful diversity, which cannot exist in a winner-takes-all competition. The rise of first-run syndication was a profound crack in the winner-takes-all edifice of network programming.

By B.K. Marcus Vote2 3

Does Thoreau Belong to Our Tradition? May 26, 2014

“THE HIPPIES CAN’T HAVE THOREAU,” wrote former Freeman editor John Chamberlain in July of 1967. It had been 150 years since Thoreau’s birth (July 12, 1817), and the US Postal Service had caused some controversy by issuing a commemorative stamp. What was the issue? Conservatives complained that Thoreau looked like a hippie. Chamberlain called their complaints “well-meaning but stupid.… They wore [beards] in the Nineteenth Century, you know.” The conservatives of the late 1960s were not alone in seeing the similarity. The bearded counterculturalists wanted to claim Thoreau as one of their own. “Indeed,” proclaimed one underground newspaper of the...

By B.K. Marcus Vote9 4

The Nightmare of a Free Market: Buying Drugs from Strangers May 5, 2014

Update John will be giving a version of the same talk tonight (May 8) at 9 PM ET: Hope to see you there! This week's featured guide at Liberty.me is Dr. John Hunt's "Surviving Obamacare"— which is about navigating around Obamacare in order to pursue free-market healthcare in an ever-less-free healthcare market. John is a local comrade. I only met him in person about a year ago, but we had already worked together extensively online to put together his great libertarian action-adventure thriller Higher Cause for Laissez Faire Books. (I'm sorry to say that I had nothing to do with...

By B.K. Marcus Vote6 3

Proud Little Englander Apr 21, 2014

A battle of words from Victorian England continues to haunt advocates of freedom and peace in the 21st century. British Sky Broadcasting's An Idiot Abroad is the latest attempt by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, the creators of the BBC's The Office, to find humor in humiliating and ridiculing their friend Karl Pilkington — this time by sending him around the world to "experience" other cultures. Stephen Merchant explains: "He is a typical Little Englander and he doesn't like going out of his comfort zone." [Read the rest of this article at the Freeman.]

By B.K. Marcus Vote0 0

Goldilocks and the 3 Sovereign Clients of Ursa Mutual Mar 13, 2014

Goldilocks awakened to find herself surrounded by 3 bears: a great big bear, a medium-sized bear, and a little Baby Bear. She screamed in terror and tried to run away, but the great big bear grabbed her and held her between his giant paws. His claws touched the flesh of her neck, but they didn't press inward. Not yet. "Growarrrrrr-grrrrrrr-aaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrggrr," the big bear roared. Goldilocks did not speak bear. "Garrarrgr, roo-rooorgahrg," said the medium-sized bear. The Baby Bear just seemed to be whimpering. Here is what they were really saying: "Where do you think you're going, you little juvenile delinquent?!"...

By B.K. Marcus Vote0 1

Check Your History Mar 11, 2014

In a recent Freeman article, "Check Your Context," columnist Sarah Skwire brought my attention to a popular meme on the political left, both online and off: "Check your privilege." At its gentlest, this is advice to raise our awareness of those aspects of our personal histories that may lead to complacent assumptions about how the world works, assumptions that may limit the scope of our moral imaginations.  When it is less gentle (which is often), it is a dismissal of the opinions of anyone who is insufficiently poor, or, more likely, insufficiently left-wing. I hadn't heard "check your privilege" before,...

By B.K. Marcus Vote3 1

Black Death and Taxes Nov 25, 2013

Besieging the Black Sea port of Caffa, the Mongols began to fall to the invisible arrows of a plague that had followed the Silk Road from the arid plains of central Asia. While the Genoese they wanted to capture were safe within the city, Mongol bodies piled up outside its walls. The Mongols of the Golden Horde then did something unprecedented in both the history of warfare and the history of disease. They piled their dead into catapults and hurled them over the city walls, raining diseased corpses on the besieged Genoese. These Italian merchants—visitors at the edge of the...

By B.K. Marcus Vote1 0

TV’s Third Golden Age Oct 9, 2013

Over the summer, Netflix made history, receiving 14 Emmy nominations for its original TV programming. The number of nominations was not remarkable. What was unprecedented was that the nominated comedies and dramas — now recognized as the highest quality available for television — are not for broadcast television. They're not cable shows, either. Netflix is the leading provider of on-demand Internet streaming media — and its "TV shows" are produced for the Internet. The company's 38 million subscribers can stream the new videos to their computers, tablets, and smartphones, as well as their online TV sets. Most of the nominations...

By B.K. Marcus Vote4 1

Lady Liberty: An Unauthorized Biography Aug 20, 2013

Was the Statue of Liberty a gift from the people of France? That's the official story, even more than a century later. The statue, which was dedicated in 1886, is maintained by the National Park Service, whose website makes the claim so many of us learned in school: "The Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World was a gift of friendship from the people of France to the people of the United States." But how can "the people of France" give anything to anyone? For most of my life, I assumed the statue was a gift from the French government to...

By B.K. Marcus Vote0 2

Putting Hedy Lamarr on Hold: Why Did It Take So Long for the World to Go Wireless? Aug 1, 2013

Hedy stands naked in a field. She looks off-camera in dismay as her horse gallops away with the clothes she had draped over its back so she could take a dip in a woodland pond. She is not called Lamarr yet. That name will come later, in Hollywood. For now she is still Hedwig Kiesler, a Viennese teenager in Prague, playing her first starring role in a feature film, Ekstase (“Ecstasy,” 1933). The controversial Czechoslovakian film will become famous for Hedy's nude scenes and its sex scenes (which show only her face, in close-up, in the throes of passion). The...

By B.K. Marcus Vote3 0

Worshipping the Wrong Goddess Jul 22, 2013

The crowd in Tiananmen Square was losing hope. Their mass protest had drawn throngs of students at first, but as the summer of 1989 approached, their numbers were dwindling, their leaders were resigning, and the square itself, according to one historian of China's democracy movement, "had degenerated into a shantytown, strewn with litter and permeated by the stench of garbage and overflowing portable toilets." The democracy movement seemed to be dying, not with a bang, but with a whimper. This was before most of us in the West had ever heard of Tiananmen Square. What turned the protest around? Why...

By B.K. Marcus Vote0 0

Did Capitalism Give Us the Laugh Track? May 30, 2013

The Internet has given new life to old TV shows, reminding us not only of how different things looked several decades ago but also how very different they sounded. If you watch old reruns of shows like Hogan's Heroes or Get Smart, you may notice that some of the jokes are still funny, but the artificial laughter that accompanies every gag on the sound reel can quickly alienate us from the humor. "Most critics think that the laugh track is the worst thing that ever happened to the medium," says University of Minnesota art history professor Karal Ann Marling, "because...

By B.K. Marcus Vote0 0

Login