June 19, 2014
A Little Bit of History Repeating
Yesterday, I said this. Whatever one thinks the proper role of government is, it surely is not this. At a bare minimum, we must demand that the government not force…
June 19, 2014
Is Living on the Dole Bad For You?
As a proponent of a UBI, I often encounter some version of the surfer objection: what if some people who could work instead spend their entire income allowance on surfing or drinking or…
June 18, 2014
Don’t Dumb Down Justice to Accommodate Bad Motivations
Cohen says, and I agree, that whether something is desirable or better from a moral point of view has nothing to do with whether it’s feasible. It’s not possible for…
June 18, 2014
The Mickey Mouse Clubhouse Village
Chapter 2 of Why Not Capitalism? features a complete, almost paragraph-by-paragraph, parody of Cohen’s Why Not Socialism?. I mimic his argument, writing style, and phrasing. I often just borrow paragraphs but switch…
June 18, 2014
Reverse Hugo, with a Twist
In Victor Hugo’s great novel Les Miserables, Jean Valjean is sentenced to five years on the prison galleys for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his family. It is an outrageous…
June 17, 2014
Whose Left? Which Libertarianism?
Over at C4SS I’ve posted the abstract to a paper on Left-Libertarianism: Its Past, Its Present, Its Prospects that I’ll be presenting at the MANCEPT 2014 Workshop on the Current…