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2006 Liberty Summer Seminar



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Windsor Liberty Seminar Sets:

2007 Windsor Liberty Seminar



2006 WLS

How to save the tiger.

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

Windsor Liberty Seminar Video

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.

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

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

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!