Blue Balloon

After a winter in snow and cold, sunny days are back in Toronto. Of course, work went on. But tomorrow is Saturday and it’s time for some rest…

“There can be no liberty unless there is economic liberty.” – Margaret Thatcher

It doesn’t sound as romantic as you’d like, but probably economic liberty is a more fundamental kind of freedom than political liberty. The past few years, China entered capitalistic reform. Now, the leaders of its autocra

tic ex-communistic regime start thinking of turning to democracy. The steps towards political freedom are minor for the moment and the process, if successful, will probably take long. But it’s totally amazing that, under other circumstances, it would take a bloody revolution for such a turn. It’s a ‘capitalistic revolution‘ this time that paves the way for a peaceful democratic reform.

The Greeks Liberals (libertarians for the North Americans) take action and support Kareem in a peaceful and orderly protest outside the Egyptian embassy in Athens. The event will take place this Friday, 6pm. The event was announced through e-rooster, a greek liberal blog.

Here you can find Kareem’s post and here you can read about the event on which Kareem commented, from the BBC website.

Read also this interesting article from Economist on bloggers and the political trouble they cause to authoritarian Arab governments. Economist is probably right. This might be only the beginning of a critical fight for free speech.

Economist supports Sarcozy, one week before the first round of French elections. And continued the tradition of great covers. I wonder if they’ll support Giuliani, too. Although for his case, there is a long way to run.

This is the official site of Sarkozy’s campaign. I think the people who designed it did a good job reflecting Sarcozy’s powerful and no-nonsense image on the site.

http://www.sarkozy.fr/home/

Ubi dubium ibi libertas

Libertarian thought provided the basic axes on which the modern western civilization was, and still is, built today – that is, individual liberty, the rule of law and capitalism. And not only it prevailed against marxism, collectivism, fascism and communism, but more than this, where applied, it helped create the necessary conditions for progress.

For nearly one century, libertarianism was the voice of reason against an irrational, dogmatic, mystical system of beliefs. But the most important thing to point out here is that the kind of ‘reason’ libertarianism is based upon and made it so special, actually relates to a negative sense of knowledge. Libertarianism’s principles proved to be better than others, because they embodied the fact that sometimes we just do not know what solution is good for a problem and that the right way to find it out is the hard way.

I am, as a libertarian, in favor of individual liberty and (of course) responsibility, not because I see humans as beings that live or should live alone (which I do not), neither because I believe that individuals do not need help (again, I do not). But because, if we begin building a system that tells people how to live or decides what kind of help they need, there will be a time when the smallest fault in the system (lack of knowledge is only one possible reason for such faults) will have the worst consequences for everyone. I support capitalism for similar reasons with individual liberty – because numerous ‘local’ economic decisions prove to be in the long run more safe than big central decisions. And finally, I support the rule of law because, together with a democratic mechanism for the limitation of arbitrary power, it provides a slow but safe way to capitilize on our experience and make changes when we know that they will be in the right direction.

None of the above is a golden rule for all the problems we might face as humans or humanity. There might well be cases where the above fail and other political ‘tools’ are needed (there is no society that is organized based on only these three principles). But remember, we do not have to choose between a perfect system and a faulty one. Nor we live after a perfect past where every problem was solved. The important thing to keep from libertarianism’s legacy is that individual liberty, rule of law and capitalism provide approximate rules of thumb that manage to avoid a lot of worst case scenarios and help in the creation of good life conditions. And they work well in expectation. Far better than every other political system tried on Earth. This happened because we managed to reason not only on what we know, but also on what we do not know.

I believe that the predominance of libertarianism was a big leap forward for the western societies that practiced its principles. It would be even greater if people could consider why this happened. It is essential, if we want to take still some leaps further.

While playing around with Youtube, I fell upon a song I used to like. One year ago, I used to listen to this song again and again. I learned it on the guitar. I played it while watching the video.

It was only one year ago. But there are so many things that have changed since then. I don’t think I like it anymore. Together with so many other things that I left behind.

Isn’t it magic? I mean, some things that we now take for granted or seem just natural, were completely out the picture a few years back.