The New York State legislature has just legalized gay marriage in New York.

For the libertarian reasons I’ve outlined here and here, I don’t think this is the optimal way to address the issue of marriage inequality; it takes a set of special government preferences (for heterosexual married couples) and extends those benefits to a wider group of people (heterosexual and homosexual married couples), while leaving enormous pools of people short of the benefits (single people, people who prefer polygamy, and the huge and growing group of long-term monogamous cohibatators).

It’s kind of like if the civil rights act had said “no discrimination against blacks” instead of “no discrimination on account of race.” Not a bad thing, by any means, but hardly a statement of universal equality on the issue of human sexual relationships. More after the jump. Continue reading →

It is absolutely breathtaking to watch a vigorous, bi-partisan debate on the floor of the House over the war powers of the President. Agree or disagree with the war in Libya, the War Powers Act, the global war on terrorism, or the contemporary reading of the Constitutional war powers of the President, this is fundamentally what the American legislature is supposed to do — have heated debates over declarations of war (not) requested by the executive — and too often does not.

Go Congress!

One of my biggest pet peeves in political discourse is the constant charge of hypocrisy, both explicit and implicit.  They take many forms, most of which you are probably familiar with, and all of which can be grouped into two categories. Continue reading →

I was just walking down South Capitol Street, and I saw a guy wearing a #37 Strasburg jersey.

An Expos jersey. Continue reading →

In my previous post, I suggested that one way of putting the breaks our tendency toward global empire would be to institutional dis-incentivize both the President and Congress from deploying and using the military except when absolutely necessary. Continue reading →

So I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about how to adjust the Constitution to de-incentivize the 20th and 21st century American tendency toward global military empire. And I came up with three broad goals:

1) Create institutional incentives that dissuade the President from deploying troops without congressional consent;

2) Create institutional incentives that dissuade Congress from granting that consent;

3) Create institutional incentives that dissuade the average citizen from supporting wars of choice.

Now, that’s the easy part. The hard part is coming up with such institutional incentives, and creating them in such a way as to not make a mockery of the whole thing or give rise to silly unintended consequences. Continue reading →