“First They Came for the Professors…”

“….but I was a university administrator, so I called the cops, egged them on, and assumed the role of aggrieved victim.”

Ironically, Emory University’s Caroline Fohlin specializes in the political economy of early twentieth century Germany. You can’t make shit like that up, but her arrest does starkly raise the question posed by Jason Brennan’s valuable book, When All Else Fails: The Ethics of Resistance to State Injustice (Princeton, 2018): when, exactly, does it become legitimate to fight back? And how? Those aren’t rhetorical questions, and the answers don’t involve an infinite regress. Individual human beings have a right of self-defense, after all. Believe it or not, that right isn’t just the monopoly of Jewish States.

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Tomfoolery in the Overhead Compartment

The Agoric Cafe is serving once again!

In my latest video, I chat with globetrotting, gunslinging, contraband-smuggling libertarian scholar Tom G. Palmer on the legitimacy of self-defense; the militarisation of police; prison abolitionism; the wars on drugs, guns, and gays; the economics and ethics of bounty hunting; the French liberal demystification of the state; lawlessness vs. anarchy; the perversities of the FDA and CDC; Afghan libertarianism; hatred as a treacherous muse; how to sneak a photocopy machine into the Soviet bloc; and the height of the sky.