From the monthly archives:

February 2002

Off to the Seminar Table

February 28, 2002

Off to the Seminar Table — I’ll be gone over the weekend to attend a seminar about welfare and individual responsibility with a bunch of grad students, so I won’t be posting. However, I’ll try to make it up to you Sunday night. My hope is that a bunch of Ph.D. students from ritzier schools [...]

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The Benevolent Market — Also

February 27, 2002

The Benevolent Market – Also in Reason, check out Ron Bailey’s piece on some cross cultural experiments conducted by anthropologists and economists. It turns out that people experienced with markets are nicer. The experiments are part of a fascinating larger project to develop a realistic alternative to the startlingly silly homo economicus model of human [...]

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Liberty and Low Brow– Let

February 26, 2002

Liberty and Low Brow– Let me breathlessly recommend Charles Freund’s In Praise of Vulgarity in Reason — the best magazine article I’ve read this year. Freund beautifully makes the case for the liberatory power of pop culture.

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Ready, Set, Refute! — I

February 26, 2002

Ready, Set, Refute! — I have just looked into the heart of the coming evil. Is it a terrorist plot? No! It’s a philosophy book… about taxes! NYU’s Thomas Nagel and Liam Murphy have teamed up to justify the inherently violent redistributive functions of the managerial welfare state in The Myth of Ownership: Taxes and [...]

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Political Ecology — You may

February 24, 2002

Political Ecology — You may know about the idea in biology of the evolutionary stable strategy. An implication of the idea is that a mix of strategies can be in a sort of equilibrium, while a single or pure strategy may be unstable.
Here’s the classic example, from the originator of the idea, John Maynard Smith:
As [...]

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Progressive Libertarianism — Peter St.

February 24, 2002

Progressive Libertarianism — Peter St. Andre has some great thoughts on moral progress and the attitude that distinguishes progressives from paleos. It looks like we’ve been thinking quite along the same lines. Peter also mentions ‘urban libertarianism’. Maybe ‘cosmopolitan libertarianism’ is better… Hmmm… Cosmopolitan progressive libertarianism. How could you be against that!? I especially like [...]

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Positive Rights and the Branching

February 24, 2002

Positive Rights and the Branching Garden of Paths — How about a little wandering, inconclusive speculative philosophy? Libertarians tend to conceive of harm in terms of rights violations. I steal your car, I’ve harmed you. The state denies me the ability to use my property for certain purposes, and I’m harmed. I’ve been thinking about [...]

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Libertarianism: Left and Right –

February 21, 2002

Libertarianism: Left and Right — I just ran across an essay, “What Libertarianism Isn’t” by Ed Feser, on LewRockwell.com, written in the wake of the “cultural libertarianism” debate instigated by Jonah Goldberg. In his essay, Feser argues that libertarianism, the right, and traditional morality fit hand in glove, and that folks like Nick Gillespie of [...]

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The Left vs. Poor Black

February 19, 2002

The Left vs. Poor Black Kids — The public schools systematically squelch the potential of millions of underprivileged children every day. The ACLU and the NAACP wants to keep it that way. Check out William McGurn’s outstanding and damning story in Opinion Journal.

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Pathologizing Dissent — A while

February 19, 2002

Pathologizing Dissent — A while back I gave a little analysis of the PoMo/AntiGlobo left. The upshot was that left chose to reject reason and progress, rather than socialism, when reason showed that socialism is hopeless and capitalism leads to progress. However, I was stumped by the way in which this arm of the left [...]

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The Race To Equality –

February 19, 2002

The Race To Equality — Here’s a nice piece by John Nye (an economic historian, not Bill, the science guy) explaining how economic growth diminishes inequality. The upshot is that differences in income hide everything that really matters: the quality of what you can afford. The difference between rich and poor in transportation [...]

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Out of the Darkness –

February 19, 2002

Out of the Darkness – Yes. I disappeared. I hope you have not abandoned me, though I could not blame you. The static blog reeks of death. If you must know, I went into seclusion to study the dark arts of the social and cognitive sciences to unlock the secrets of the social world. You [...]

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More Nozickiana — The Economist

February 1, 2002

More Nozickiana — The Economist has an excellent combined obituary and review of Invariances.

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