From RR

• War, peace and the season of hope. An Easter basket of goodies for anti-interventionists.
• Big government is the biggest business of all.
• Pacifism is self-righteously passing the buck. As a universal principle not voluntary like some Christians. More.
• A free-market solution to piracy. With the rest of the world I’m happy that Captain Phillips is free and salute the US Navy for their work. But like companies have private armies in Iraq, why not rent a private navy (seagoing security guards) for your company’s ships? (Because in a truly free society like that the state would lose power and we mustn’t have that, oh no.) Update: Fr Methodius and Pastor ‘LutherPunk’ discuss this.
• Second-level libertarianism.
• Prison reform. Since 1984, America’s prison population has quadrupled from 580,000 to 2.3 million. Sen. Jim Webb: With so many of our citizens in prison compared with the rest of the world, there are only two possibilities: Either we are home to the most evil people on earth or we are doing something different – and vastly counterproductive.
• ‘Aw, shucks, I was just following orders.’ ‘Good faith’ not an excuse for torture.
• Governments ought not to be counted on to direct an economic system. The people of that system might not want to comply with The Plan they hatch there in Washington. They may well have other ideas in mind. In a genuine free market — not to shabby facsimile we have had in place for decades on end — the interacting individuals would figure out what is best for them and follow their judgments thus informed. And that would, like Adam Smith suggested, lead to the optimum overall economic benefit of all!
• ‘Hope’ abandoned. It was obvious from the moment that Barack Obama appointed Leon Panetta to head the CIA that there was going to be no serious investigation. Also: national security, the last refuge of scoundrels.
• If free speech is a natural right, then the State has no business censoring my words. If the right to self-defense is a natural right, then the State has no business telling me what type of weapons I may purchase. If private property is a natural right, then the State has no business telling me how I can dispose of my own property. As long as I do not use my speech or weapons or property to infringe on the property or lives of others, I have done nothing to justify threats of violence or the actual exercise of violence against my person.
• One more time: get government out of the marriage biz. We’re out of communion on this earth (but as Orthodox Metropolitan Platon of Kiev said our walls don’t reach to heaven) but politically the Jake-ites and I could all get along... if the left were about freedom not more coercion. That reminds me: why on earth would Sacha Baron-Cohen pick on Ron Paul, who offers this peaceful solution? Again the left are not about choice but forcing you to obey them and they’re snobs as well (Paul’s personal old-fashionedness is uncool I suppose... as the kids say, whatever). Anyway what’s fair for homosexuals is also so for responsible, consenting polygamists (who don’t coerce people or sponge off the state) and even for Catholics.
• Angela Merkel has a clue. We must look at the causes of this crisis. It happened because we were living beyond our means... governments encouraged risk-taking in order to boost growth.