Final Micro-Loan of the Year

The Moorfield Storey Institute regularly gives micro-loans to individuals developing their businesses in the developing world. We have made loans in Ecuador, Benin, Tajikistan, Zambia, Bolivia, Peru, Paraguay, Mongolia, Azerbaijan, and El Salvador. The Institute is entirely funded by donations from its staff, friends and from proceeds from sales at our book service, Fr33minds.com.

Our most recent loan is to Eris Rodolfo in El Salvador. Eris runs a bookstore and general store from the same premises. He lives with his in-laws, his wife, and two children, 7 and 15. He has one employee and has been in business for three years. He wishes to purchase notebooks and books for the new school term as well a products such as cooking oil, and grains. He is trying to expand his inventory so as to improve his economic position.

The Storey Institute is a 501(c)3 organization. Your donations are critical. Most of the Institute's income comes from the staff, who donate their time and resources. In addition to running the Adam Smith Benevolent Fund, the outlet for our charitable giving, we operate Cobden Press, which publishes books of interest to classical liberals and libertarians. We distribute books at discounted prices through Fr33minds.com and also contribute a regular column to Huffington Post. At this time, due to the lingering recession sales have been slow at Fr33minds.

The Institute is having a very rough time financially. Your donations are tax deductible and are especially needed at this time. To make a donation just go here.

Catholicism and the "Intolerance" Hoax

The Washington Post says that Catholic Archbishop Charles Chaput “painted a bleak picture of a nation increasingly intolerant of Christianity.” Chaput, who achieved an ecclesiastical position superior to Christ himself, says, “The America emerging in the next several decades is likely to be much less friendly to Christian faith than anything in our country’s past.”

Please note the bait-and-switch here. One may be unfriendly to a dogma without being intolerant. Merriam-Webster defines intolerant, in the religious sense, as “unwilling to grant equal freedom of expression especially in religious matters.”

This sort of “intolerance” is not actually an issue. What the Archbishop whines about is not any attempt to prevent representatives of the Vatican from expressing a viewpoint, or even from practicing their faith, within their churches, as they see fit. This simply is not happening. What the Catholic Church complains about something is quite different. The areas where they are most upset have to do with granting equality of rights to gay people. The Church is quite intolerant of men who have romantic/sexual relationships with other adult men, for instance. They desire that the law reflect their religious views.

That is an entirely different issue; they are the ones being intolerant. Tolerance implies the granting of equal freedom to others. It does not require that one be “friendly” to ideas that one finds distasteful, whatever the reason for the sour taste. Disliking gay marriage is not "friendly," wanting to ban it is intolerant.

The Catholic Bishops, are “feeling under siege: from a broader culture moving toward accepting gay marriage.” This is correct, but when they say that is “chipping away at religious liberty” they have engaged in semantics of Orwellian proportions. They have completely reversed the facts. The Church, when gay couples are given equal rights, can still practice its faith. No religious group has ever been forced to perform a marriage to which it is religiously opposed. The Church can also set its own policies for who may, or may not, hold ecclesiastical office—and one would think the Bishops would be looking at the choices they have made for the priesthood before worrying about the marriage contracts of others.

The Largest Boatlift in History and It Was Here

So many people remember the evacuation at Dunkirk, when hundreds of private boats crossed the English Channel to rescue trapped soldiers, their backs to the sea and the Nazi troops in front of them. The Dunkirk Boatlift rescued over 300,000 soldiers. But on 9/11 500,000 people were evacuated from Manhattan.

There was no government plan to evacuate. In fact, the people trapped on Manhattan were trapped because the authorities had shut down mass transit and closed the bridges. People were stuck and afraid. Many had no idea what was going on. All they knew was there was an attack, the Twin Towers were down and the lower part of the island was covered in dirt and dust from the collapse, the air was difficult to breath. And they wanted to go home.

One Coast Guard official, witnessing the throngs of people who had fled to the water's edge put out a radio message. He simply asked the public, the people the politicians don't trust in these circumstances, to help. He urged anyone with a boat to please come to Manhattan and help these people.

And they did, by the hundreds. Yet, when we watch disasters unfold, inevitably the politicians and bureaucrats rush in and try to order the "civilians" to cease all assistance immediately and "leave it to the experts."

I was in San Francisco the day the earthquake hit in 1989. Throughout that day the "civilians" were putting out fires, directing traffic, and shuttling commuters around the city. In addition, they were the ones rescuing people from the collapsed highway and from buildings that had pancaked. They did so while the "professionals" were standing around debating whether to do anything, and, what.  Here is a short documentary about how civilians shuttled 500,000 people out of Manhattan on 9/11.

If libertarians are selfish, how do you explain him?

Libertarians are selfish, self-centered, mean people only out for themselves. Well, that’s what I’ve heard. Critics on both the left, and the right have said so. It must be true. But how do they explain John Perry?

John Perry, like President Obama, is the offspring of an interracial marriage. And like Obama he had a strong interest in politics and even went to law school, befriending John F. Kennedy, Jr. there. It hadn’t always been clear that John would go to law school, or any university for that matter. As a child he was believed to have a learning disability. He was nine before he learned to tie his shoes or to read. But he discovered a passion for learning. After studying French he went to learn Spanish, Russian, Portuguese and Swedish.


After law school, John and a friend specialized in helping immigrants find their way through the legal labyrinth constructed by xenophobes to keep them out. John helped many of them file for political asylum. Then John did something odd, he went to the police academy and became a police officer, taking a job investigating police abuses after his graduation. He became active in the New York Civil Liberties Union and a board member. Executive director Barbara Bernstein remembers him as a passionate defender of the rights of others. She said: “At board meetings… he sort of out libertarianed us. If someone thought it wasn’t the right timing or wasn’t winnable, he was an idealist. He made us justify what we were doing.”