The Institute for Liberal Studies

2007 Liberty Summer Seminar photos...

2007-08-23T08:34:00.000-07:00

... in all their glory! Enjoy!

LSS 2007!

2007-08-21T14:51:00.001-07:00

Still recovering from the 2007 Liberty Summer Seminar, which took place this past weekend. There were some really amazing speakers - Ben Perrin, founder of The Future Group, brought to light the devastating problem of child sex slavery in the world and the non-government initiatives that he and his friends have put in place to start solving this problem - and they have. What a great cause - one I'm eager to start looking into once I get home.

The Institute for Liberal Studies was happy to announce Marc Emery and Gerry Nicholls (both of whom gave pretty amazing talks) have been brought aboard as Associates of the Institute.

Actually, I'm going to stop ranting about the speakers, as Karen Selick, Crashers Jason and Erin from Bureaucrash, Avril Allen, Grant Brown, musical acts Neville Arbuckle and Lindy, and, of course, ILS President Jan Narveson, all gave really great talks and performances (respectively) that will be put online as soon as possible. For a more immediate preview of the videos, I'm working on uploading my photos, so stay tuned!

(And why not a video to whet your appetite?)

You are only 30 days away...

2007-07-19T11:52:00.000-07:00

... from the 2007 Liberty Summer Seminar!

The seventh annual Liberty Summer Seminar is fast approaching. Falling on the August 18-19 weekend, the overnight retreat features a concert, incredible food, great people, and a bevy of pro-liberty speakers. We even have a theme song!

This year's speakers include:

Benjamin Perrin, Assistant professor of law at the University of British Columbia and member of the editorial board of C2C: Canada's Journal of Ideas
MP Scott Reid, representative for Lanark-Frontenac-Lennox & Addington and fighter for Canadian liberty in the House of Commons
Jason Talley, Bureaucrash Crasher-in-Chief
Gerry Nicholls, columnist, Senior Fellow at the Democracy Institute
Karen Selick, lawyer and columnist with the Western Standard
Dr. Jan Narveson, professor of philosophy, University of Waterloo, Order of Canada recipient, lover of liberty.
Avril Allen, Canadian Constitution Foundation Lawyer

We are also very pleased to announce that our headline speaker will be none other than Marc Emery, referred to as the "Prince of Pot." Marc is the editor of Cannabis Culture magazine and a great freedom fighter who has long been dedicated to the fight to legalize marijuana - a fight that has recently landed him in a battle with the US government. To learn more about Marc and his current fight, take a look at this “60 Minutes" video.

Meanwhile, our musical act will again be Lindy!

Make sure to register at LiberalStudies.ca before July 28th to save $10 on registration. The price is $55 for students and $75 for everyone else. After the 28th, it will be $65 and $85, respectively.

Please also consider helping our fund raising efforts by visiting our main site, or by clicking on the "ChipIn" button found on this blog.

As always, if you have questions, suggestions, or advice, please don't hesitate to get in touch with us. Clicking "reply" to this email will do the trick!

Cheers,

The Liberty Summer Seminar Team

Liberty Seminar pics on Flickr!

2007-05-21T22:25:00.000-07:00

Liberty Summer Seminar Sets:

2006 Liberty Summer Seminar

2005 LSS

2004 LSS

2003 LSS

2002 LSS

2001 LSS

Windsor Liberty Seminar Sets:

2007 Windsor Liberty Seminar

2006 WLS

How to save the tiger.

2007-05-20T19:25:00.000-07:00

Which country is thinking about applying free-market principles to wildlife preservation and, in the process, improving the survival chances of a long-endangered species while giving its economy a boost?

Communist China, of course.

Clicking on the above excerpt will take you to a thought-provoking argument for saving animals subject to poaching by embracing the demand for the products they're killed for (furs, teeth, bones, etc.)

Farming these animals would meet the demand for the products they're killed for, in contrast to the current prohibition on the products that increases the value of these animals in the black market and makes it worthwhile to illegally hunt animals in their natural habitats. (Not to mention necessitates the involvement of crime in the production of different products. Sound familiar?)

The article uses tigers as an example - tigers are apparently ridiculously easy to breed, to the point that in India breeding tigers is reduced to avoid overpopulation in zoos.

If a tiger farming market was set up, thousands of tigers a year could be raised to meet the demands of, say, the Chinese markets for different medicinal products or exotic fur traders, reducing the price of tiger products and taking away the incentive to go hunting for an endangered species. In addition, since so many tigers would be bred, reintroduction techniques could be used to further increase the wild
tiger population.

Of course there would be opposition to this - the thought of tigers being bred for fur, meat, etc. isn't a great one. Let's face it, they're beautiful animals and it's not nice (at least for me) to think of them being raised for something like fur or claws, but the pros in this case would greatly outweigh the cons - if we could stop poaching of wild tigers it would be worth it. No government policy will make people stop wanting the products that they want - this is why prohibitions are uniformly detrimental to societies where they're implemented.
Now, obviously this wouldn't work for all animals - pandas are notoriously hard to breed in captivity, for instance - but by doing something very simple: providing for a demand on the market, we could save an animal as amazing as the tiger from extinction in the wild.

h/t - the Institute for Humane Studies, who sent me this link as part of my readings for a free summer seminar I'll be attending in July.

x-posted to Liberty is Good and Bureaucrash

Fundraising for LSS

2007-05-06T16:54:00.001-07:00

Windsor Liberty Seminar Video

2007-04-25T15:00:00.000-07:00

For those who missed this year's Windsor Liberty Seminar, or did attend and want to see it again, here are the videos of the four talks. This was our first outing with the new camcorder, future attempts will feature better lighting.

The day started off with Dr. Fred Miller (Professor of Philosophy at Bowling Green State University) giving an excellent talk on the philosophy of liberty with emphasis on the ideas of Aristotle.

Next up was Malkin Dare, President of the Society for Quality Education. Malkin explained how school choice makes education better for all of us.

We returned from lunch to hear Jim Watkin of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition evaluate North American drug policy.

And our last speaker of the day was Brett Skinner, the Fraser Insitute's Director of Pharmaceutical and Health Policy Studies. Brett's explanation of how liberty and individualism can improve the Canadian system is a must-see for anyone concerned about health care.

peter kormos is after my kidneys, frank klees wants to bribe me with health care and driving privileges.

2007-04-19T07:32:00.000-07:00

You can call libertarians alarmist all you want when we're talking about the encroaching state, but when the government starts talking about having a right to your organs by default, all I'm saying is that maybe you might want to start listening to us.
(Granted, it's just the opposition talking about it now, but I have faith in Smitherman to pick the most freedom-hating option.)

And Frank? What the hell? Didn't this guy want private health care a few short years ago?

Klees says the law would ~~create jobs for bureaucrats~~ promote awareness. So why not just print off a bunch of posters and pamphlets and distribute them to the local library? Because in Ontario, it's acceptable to withhold government monopolized services to force consent.

If the purpose of a driver's license is to ensure that you're a safe driver, then why on Earth would it have anything to do with your organ donation or high school education intentions? And I guess now, if you carry the bill through logically, you have a univeral right to health care... so long as you do what we want.

(Of course, if all the government wanted was for everyone to have access to health care and education, they would have just subsidized insurance and tuition... but I digress.)

Credit for the quote and a hat tip go to The London Fog. If you don't read them, you should.

x-posted to Liberty is Good

UPDATE: due to a long, drawn out argument with Matt, I am refining the title of my post.

feds charging huge markup on pot

2007-04-16T14:39:00.000-07:00

The Canadian Press reports today that Health Canada is charging patients fifteen times what they pay for medicinal marijuana.

...the Access to Information Act show that Health Canada pays $328.75 for each kilogram of bulk medical marijuana produced by Prairie Plant Systems Inc. ... [and] sells the marijuana to a small group of authorized users for $150 – plusGST – for each 30-gram bag of ground-up flowering tops, with a strength of up to 14 per cent THC, the main active ingredient. That works out to $5,000 for each kilogram, or a markup of more than 1,500 per cent.

Sure, it's lower than street prices, but never forget that the only reason street prices are as high as they are in the first place is that the government continues to fight legalisation. Even with the sin taxes that would likely be piled on the base price of legal pot it's unlikely that people would be paying what these pain patients are if pot was sold in an open market.

Don't think for a second that typical government bureaucratic stupidity doesn't have a hand in this. Health Canada pays a ludicrous packaging fee of $9.06 for each 30-gram package to the suppliers. No one is going to convince me that I can buy an EggMcMuffin for $2.64 and that pays for the food (with egg market control),
packaging, labour and a profit but Health Canada can't find someone who will package some dried leaves for less than $9.

Thankfully, most medicinal marijuana users can grow their own pot and avoid these
ridiculous fees, but - here's a shocker - the government is planning to phase out all other suppliers but its own "sometime after 2007."

(I'll let you insert your own joke equating the government with the organized crime they think they're fighting via the drug war.)

x-posted to Bureaucrash and Liberty is Good.

Another LSS music picture collage video

2007-04-13T07:48:00.000-07:00

Paul over at Blue Blogging Soapbox put a second video together. His YouTubing skills are better than mine, since I stil haven't figured out how he got the photos to look so clear. Enjoy!

LSS Theme Song

2007-04-12T21:57:00.000-07:00

Yes, believe it or not, the Liberty Summer Seminar (happening August 18, 19) has an official theme song. A theme song. You know, like a TV show. Lindy, who rocks, put this song together yesterday, and I did my best to put together a slide show for everyone (can you do better? Help us by putting together a video for the song yourself!)

You can check it out here (YouTube):

Or here (Google Video):

tattoos and liberty

2007-04-09T16:06:00.001-07:00

I'm considering getting a tattoo of ama-gi, the earliest known writing of the word "freedom" and was trying to find out if the Ontario tattoo industry was regulated or not, since if it was I would go to Michigan, where the industry is unregulated.

I texted my friend, who has a bunch of tattoos, is best friends with the girlfriend of a tattoo artist and worked in a tattoo parlour for a while, to ask her if the industry was regulated. She responded to say that she didn't know, but, being the caring friend that she is, gave me a list of questions I should ask anywhere I go to verify that their equipment is safe.

She asked why I was asking, and I told her that, on principle, I wanted to get my freedom tattoo in an unregulated tattoo parlour. She responded, "So, on principle you want to get hepatitis?"

I couldn't help but laugh, half out of amusement and half out of sadness.

Let's face it: it's a very sad thing that people, even people who have been working in and using an industry that is not regulated by the government, assume that a lack of government regulation implies a lack of safety.

We went back and forth for a while on whether or not government regulation discourages people to ask the questions about safety, whether or not it would cause someone concerned about safety to stop asking those questions, whether or not government regulation stops the (already very rare) infection of hepatitis through dirty tattoo parlour needles, and such.

Finally, I had an epiphany. I texted her: "It's important to me that where I go is being safe because they think it's important to be safe, and not because they're doing the absolute minimum the government says they have to do."

And I think that's at the heart of the libertarian argument against regulation.

Government regulations take away our vigilance for our own well-being and the rewards that should be enjoyed by people who are willing to go the extra mile with their business through a declaration that all businesses are acceptable in their eyes. It's a terrible injustice; in fact the epiphany probably put me one step closer to a pro-tattoo decision.

(x-posted to Bureaucrash and Liberty is Good.)

What's wrong with this picture?

2007-04-08T08:05:00.000-07:00

Nothing really, but it's certainly a foreign concept to most Canadians.

This picture was taken at the Great Lakes Crossing Mall in Auburn Hills, Michigan. Look above the 5 and you'll see that a hospital is giving money to a shopping mall. Quite the opposite to the situation where local people and businesses are being begged to make voluntary donations on top of their taxes in support of an sustainable healthcare system.

Clearly this hospital is making bad financial decisions. I mean with all that money being spent on advertising their service must suffer. Just think of the shortages of beds, doctors, nurses and supplies. I imagine the wait in their Emergency Room goes on for days.

Oh. Maybe these guys are onto something with the whole "competition" thing after all.

H/T: To photog Janet Neilson.

Help Lindy win

2007-04-04T08:48:00.000-07:00

ILS' good friend Lindy Vopnfjord has entered a contest. He's entered his band, MajorMaker, co-fronted by Todor Kobakov, into Yahoo's "Up Yours" music contest. The reward is a stack of money, a contract with Universal Canada, studio time, and other goodies. You can help them win and get more attention (which they richly deserve).

How? Watch their video, rate them, and leave a comment. Then send the link to your friends, and encourage them to vote too. Here's the vid (follow this link if this doesn't work for you):

Lindy played the 2004 and 2006 Liberty Summer Seminar (and has agreed to come and play at this year's Liberty Summer Seminar on the August 18, 19 weekend--check out our facebook group and let us know you're coming!).

Do help. His stuff is awesome.

Interview with Peter Jaworski

2007-03-31T09:05:00.000-07:00

Institute for Liberal Studies Executive Director Peter Jaworski sits down with Windsor blogger Paul Synott to discuss the Institute.

Paying It Forward

2007-03-28T21:35:00.000-07:00

The U of T Laissez-Faire Club, founded by 2006 Windsor Liberty Seminar participant Seyitbek Usmanov, will be hosting a talk by Tom Palmer of the Cato Institute this coming Monday. Cato is a public policy think tank based in Washington, DC with a reputation for producing some great work.

I hope you can attend, but even if you can't please help Seyitbek out by spreading word about this excellent event by email, blog or any other means.

Details as follows:

Dr. Tom Palmer, Senior Fellow of the Cato Institute
"The Morality of Globalization: the Faster the Better"
Monday, April 2nd at 4:00pm
University of Toronto, Mississauga, North Building 134

(x-posted to the Calvinball Diaries)

Some of my photos from the seminar this weekend...

2007-03-26T15:09:00.000-07:00

... and a brief explanation of how things went down.

Seminar format is borrowed from the Fraser Institute's student forums, and is pretty simple but conductive to participation by all seminar attendees. First, everyone watches a speaker's presentation, as seen here:

After each speaker, seminar participants are broken into groups for guided discussion of the topic with group leaders Peter Jaworksi and Jamie Tronnes while I peskily hung around snapping photos and occasionally jumping in to contribute a point or two.
Some shots from breakout discussion group "B":

Slap some lunch in the middle of the day and a few hours spent in the room for continued, unsupervised discussion when all was said and done and you've got yourself a liberty seminar.

Thanks again to everyone who made it out this year!

another monopoly worth ending

2007-03-26T15:08:00.000-07:00

Hey, look! It's yet another reason the government shouldn't be in the business of... er... business.

Time to privatize, open up the market and let competition sort this mess out.

(x-posted to Liberty is Good.)

Windsor Liberty Seminar

2007-03-25T18:57:00.000-07:00

Thanks again to all those who came out to yesterday's Windsor Liberty Seminar. It was a great success because of you. Thanks also go out to speakers Brett Skinner (pictured), Malkin Dare, Jim Watkin and Fred Miller as well as discussion leaders Peter Jaworski and Jamie Tronnes and co-host (and videographer) Janet Neilson.

For those of you who missed it the event (shame!) we had about 40 people from all areas of the province (Ottawa, Sudbury, Toronto, Waterloo and more) and some friends from north of the border courtesy of the Mackinac Institute.

I know first-hand that all of the speakers were great and, although I was't able to see much of the discussion groups, from what I'm told the level of conversation in the breakout groups was excellent.

As for the after party, huge thanks to Lindy (awesome as always) and to Phog Lounge who hosted an incredible evening and poured some delicious beer.

(x-posted to The Calvinball Diaries)

Jim Watkin on AM 800

2007-03-23T21:04:00.000-07:00

Jim Watkin, with Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, talks about why the war on drugs needs to end on CKLW AM 800 (you can listen to it here, courtesy of Blue Blogging Soapbox).

He will be speaking at the Windsor Liberty Seminar this Saturday (later today).

Take a listen to the interview, and come out to the Seminar to talk to him in person.

(x-posted to Adventures in Bowling Green)

A Good Day for Liberty

2007-03-22T20:24:00.000-07:00

As we near the end of what has been a very bad week for liberty (federal spending up 7%, Ontario announces plans to hike its job-killing minimum wage) a couple of bright spots emerge.

In Ontario, a group of prostitutes challenge a set of laws that make life very dangerous for some of society's most vulnerable. No matter what your views on prostitution I think it's clear here that the laws against cause more problems than the acts they're designed to prevent.

New Brunswick's Liberal government opens up a dialogue on private health care delivery, and federal Conservative Minister of Health Tony Clement gives a vague answer sure to upset those on both sides of the debate.

Both look like great conversation starters for the festivities following Saturday's Windsor Liberty Seminar.

ethanol fuels beginning of the end for farm subsidies?

2007-03-22T16:11:00.000-07:00

From Small Dead Animals - here is something that never occurred to me, though it seems obvious now that I've thought about it - as research makes ethanol fuels more plausible, they are going up in demand, and the grains that are used to produce ethanol are (naturally) becoming more expensive worldwide.

Could this be the beginning of the end of farm subsidies? Will ever-higher demand for grains allow African nations to make a significant entry to the grains market and begin to pull themselves out of poverty?

It will be very interesting to see how this develops.

(x-posted to Liberty is Good)