Category: Social and Political Philosophy
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Driver Suppression and Voter Suppression
Many prominent liberals now consider verifiable ID requirements at polling places to constitute voter suppression. And of course their use of 'suppression' is normatively loaded: they pack a pejorative connotation into it. Voter suppression, as they use the phrase, is bad. Well then, do these liberals also think that requiring drivers to operate with valid…
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The Bigger the Government . . .
. . . the more to fight over. The best proof of this to date is the bitter wrangling and the wastage of time, effort, and money over Obamacare. This fight will continue until Obamacare is repealed or gutted. In the long and nasty process, the political climate in this country is bound to become…
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Trust the State, Lose Your Freedom
A Pond away, the American-born Janet Daley of The Telegraph see things with exceptional clarity. Concluding paragraphs: Economic freedom, as well as political liberty, is being traded in at a startling pace even in the US, where it was once the be-all and end-all of the American dream. US citizens are discovering that their president’s…
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How the New York Times Got Libertarianism Wrong, Yet Again
David Gordon explains: Why write an article on a subject you know nothing about? This is a question that Amia Srinivasan might usefully have asked herself. She is a Prize Fellow in philosophy at All Souls College, Oxford, one of the most prestigious academic positions in the academic world; and her webpage at Oxford includes…
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Nozick’s Political Philosophy
Keith Burgess-Jackson criticizes a recent Opiniator piece that displays the sort of bias one expects from the NYT. Related articles Questions for Free-Market Moralists Political Philosophy Questions for Free Market Moralists? Some Answers
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Progressivism as Religion: Peter Berkowitz on Ronald Dworkin
Here. Excerpt: For Dworkin, the meaning of religion consists in “two central judgments about value” that he believes religious people — theists and some atheists — regard as objectively true. First, “each person has an innate and inescapable responsibility to try to make his life a successful one: that means living well, accepting ethical responsibilities…
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School Vouchers: Another DOJ Assault on Federalism
Eric Holder's out-of-control Department of (Social) Justice is at it again, this time going after Bobby Jindal's school choice program in Louisiana. Yet another attack on federalism. This is not a word that wears its meaning on its sleeve, and the average panem et circenses American would be hard-pressed to define it. Federalism is (i)…
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Politics as Polemics: The Converse Clausewitz Principle
Would that I could avoid this political stuff. But I cannot in good conscience retreat into my inner citadel and let my country be destroyed — the country that makes it possible for me to cultivate the garden of solitude, retreat into my inner citadel, and pursue pure theory for its own sake. Political discourse…
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A Place for Polemics in Political Philosophy?
The proprietor of After Aristotle agrees with me that polemics has no place in philosophy. But he has a question for me: "Do his [my] statements about philosophy apply also to political philosophy?" My answer is that if polemics has no legitimate place in philosophy, then it follows that it has no legitimate place in…
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Separation of Leftism and State
Liberals support separation of church and state, and so do I. But they have no problem with using the coercive power of the state to impose leftist ideology. Now leftism is not a religion, pace Dennis Prager (see article below), but it is very much like one, and if you can see what is wrong with…
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My Best Independence Day Post
Patriotism and Jingoism
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Epistle from Malcolm: State, Civil Society, Individual
Malcolm Pollack e-mails: Just minutes before ambling by your place and seeing your link to Brooks, I had run across this riposte. It's worth a look, I think. This administration has aggressively sought to hollow out all the mediating layers of civil society that stand between the atomized citizen and the Leviathan (those civil associations having…
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Government as a Special Interest Group
People complain of the undue influence of special interest groups in Washington, D. C. Government itself, however, is a special interest group. For it profits those who work for it, and those who, while not working for it, depend on it for their livelihood, having been made dependent on it by policies and gimmicks that…
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Makers and Takers: “You Didn’t Build That!” Revisited
Robert Paul Wolff writes, Every one of us comes into the world endowed with a material and cultural inheritance that we have not earned and can never justify. There are no "takers" and "makers" in our society. All of the takers are makers, and all of the makers are takers. And quite often those who…
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Why Do Societies Ossify and Decline?
Victor Davis Hanson, historian and classicist, puts things in historical perspective. His piece concludes: History has shown that a government's redistribution of shrinking wealth, in preference to a private sector's creation of new sources of it, can prove more destructive than even the most deadly enemy. So much wisdom, insight, and erudition can be found…