July 20, 2012
Seen and Unseen
Whenever there’s a violent tragedy, someone immediately starts using it as an excuse to restrict civil liberties. Many on the left understand this when it comes to the Patriot Act,…
All posts in: Current Events
July 20, 2012
On Quoting Out of Context and the Right-Wing Smear Machine
Suppose I wrote the following in an article: The most charitable reconstruction of Adolf Hitler’s argument for killing Jews goes, more or less, like this. Jews are equivalent to infected…
July 19, 2012
The Implicit Errors in Debts to Society Arguments
Suppose–purely hypothetically–a prominent politician uses the following argument to explain why we should pay more taxes: If you are rich, you relied upon background infrastructure, social norms, institutions, the rule…
July 18, 2012
The Speech Mitt Romney Should Give But Won’t
My fellow Americans, I have been the target of numerous charges by my opponent in recent weeks. Rather than repeat them, I will simply say this: I will not apologize…
July 12, 2012
Marriage Equality Unbound
Of possible interest to the Bleeding Heart Liberverse: my review at Reason.com of Elizabeth Brake’s Minimizing Marriage: Marriage, Morality, and the Law. An excerpt: For Brake, marriage not only should…
July 09, 2012
Libertarianism, Freedom, and Coercion
Bertram, Robin and Gourevitch (BRG) don’t think that libertarianism takes seriously enough the ways in which workers’ freedom is restricted in a capitalist economy. Jason Brennan thinks that BRG misunderstand the sort of libertarianism…