Archive

The Conversation #62 – Rebecca Costa

If you were to ask me what the cri­sis in the present is, as an evo­lu­tion­ary biol­o­gist I have to go back mil­lions of years and try to con­nect all the dots, going back to man as a single-celled organ­ism to present time, and say­ing what is it that is caus­ing mod­ern con­ster­na­tion? More impor­tant­ly, is there a pat­tern? Has this hap­pened before? Were there some ordi­nary peo­ple like you and I, shop­keep­ers in Rome, who were stand­ing around and say­ing, You know, our lead­ers don’t seem to be on top of our prob­lems. They seem to be get­ting worse one gen­er­a­tion after another.” 

The Conversation #52 — Walter Block

Benevolence isn’t inef­fi­cient and I’m a big fan of benev­o­lence. It’s just that it’s not enough. It’s okay for a group of twenty-five or fifty peo­ple where every­one knows every­one. But when you have 300 mil­lion in the US or 7 bil­lion in the world, if we were self-sufficient and we had to pro­duce every­thing for our­selves we’d all die, or 99% of us would die. So we have to coop­er­ate with each oth­er. But the only way to coop­er­ate with each oth­er in such large num­bers is through markets. 

The Conversation #42 — Gary L. Francione

The best jus­ti­fi­ca­tion we have for killing fifty-six, fifty-seven, what­ev­er bil­lion land ani­mals and a tril­lion sea ani­mals every year is that they taste good. And so, in a sense how is this any dif­fer­ent from Michael Vick, who likes to sit around a pit watch­ing dogs fight, or at least he used to?