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Feb 27, 2024 | 
aei.org | Jim Harper |Owen O’Brien-Powers
Don’t mess with people’s stuff. It’s a casual expression of common sense that also reflects foundational property law. Secure property rights give people independence. Real property law makes our homes our castles. And, as Benjamin Constant articulated, the development of property rights in movables emancipated the peon. Imagine not having personal property rights. Cops and criminals alike could loot passersby with impunity. That doesn’t sit right.
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Jan 19, 2024 | 
aei.org | Jim Harper |Owen O’Brien-Powers
The highlight for me of David Graeber’s 2015 book, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy, is his trenchant critique of the post office, which has fallen from its essential role in Western society formation and progress to something quite deadened indeed. Postal services emerged to serve the needs of armies and empires, Graeber says.
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Oct 24, 2023 | 
inkl.com | Jim Harper
Ask any good Bigfoot enthusiast, and they’ll tell you: Sasquatch’s home turf is not the Colorado Rocky Mountains. You’ll hear the same thing from residents of Silverton, a tiny mountain enclave in the southwest of the state with fewer than 800 year-round residents. So Silvertonians have been surprised to find themselves at the centre of a Bigfoot firestorm – thanks to grainy footage taken last week from their signature train, which quickly spread across the globe.
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Oct 21, 2023 | 
inkl.com | Jim Harper
Ask any good Bigfoot enthusiast, and they’ll tell you: Sasquatch’s home turf is not the Colorado Rocky Mountains. You’ll hear the same thing from residents of Silverton, a tiny mountain enclave in the southwest of the state with fewer than 800 year-round residents. So Silvertonians have been surprised to find themselves at the centre of a Bigfoot firestorm – thanks to grainy footage taken last week from their signature train, which quickly spread across the globe.
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Sep 13, 2023 | 
aei.org | Jim Harper |Kate Beinkampen
In the digital currency arena, there seems to be no way to break the tension between the demand for privacy and the demands of law enforcement and national security. Evidently, there will be either privacy or law enforcement predicated on mass surveillance. But there are ideas meant to strike a more delicate balance, such as cryptographic proof of innocence. I have an idea that preserves transaction privacy while opening a law enforcement communications channel parallel to the transaction channel.
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Aug 23, 2023 | 
aei.org | Jim Harper |Kate Beinkampen
When you’re doing technology policy, it helps to know what you’re talking about. That could be a derisive line aimed at the many elected officials, regulators, commentators, and other experts who carry on quite nicely all the same. But what I really mean is a little different: Definitions bring issues into focus. Knowing what the thing is that you’re talking about helps identify real problems, and it creates pathways from problems to genuine solutions.
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Aug 14, 2023 | 
washingtonexaminer.com | Julian Adorney |Sally Pipes |Tina Cohen |Jim Harper
Raise your hand if you’ve ever tucked something into the waist of your pants because you have too much to carry. Now raise your other hand. Stand with your feet shoulder-width apart. The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) wants to scan you for suspicious items. Thanks to advancing technologies, new ways to search people have become a permanent fixture on our near horizon. But they run into a few challenges. One is the Constitution. A second, even more difficult one is logistics.
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Aug 14, 2023 | 
aei.org | Jim Harper |Kate Beinkampen
Raise your hand if you’ve ever tucked something into the waist of your pants because you have too much to carry. Now raise your other hand. Stand with your feet shoulder-width apart. The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) wants to scan you for suspicious items. Thanks to advancing technologies, new ways to search people have become a permanent fixture on our near horizon. But they run into a few challenges. One is the Constitution. A second, even more difficult one is logistics.
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Jul 19, 2023 | 
tinyurl.com | Jim Harper |Tobias Peter |Elizabeth Stauffer |Jason Bedrick
“I like Hitler,” New York Times columnist David French said in a recent podcast while explaining that there are “countless reasons” to read the German dictator’s book Mein Kampf. Anyone who isn’t politically demented or arguing in bad faith might pause before concluding from that snippet that French is actually a closeted Nazi sympathizer.
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Jul 19, 2023 | 
msn.com | Jim Harper
The scandals and deaths surrounding the powerful, old-money Murdaugh family in South Carolina’s Lowcountry have attracted a surge in notoriety as of late. If you’ve tuned into any piece of the family’s story—from Alex Murdaugh's ongoing murder trial to Netflix’s new docuseries Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal—you likely want to know more about where the murders took place and the state of the home now. Ahead, take a look at everything we know about the family’s infamous property.
