December 2004

It’s a shame that this Edward Prescott op-ed is behind the WSJ wall. Prescott (who won the economics Nobel this year)argues that mandatory investment accounts with limited investment options are necessary to solve the time inconsistency problem with savings.
Readers of this page will recall that I have made this proposal in a previous essay, but [...]

Posner’s first post over at Leiter’s is full ot good stuff for a philosophoblogger to philosophoblog about. Let’s do it in order. First paragraph:
Brian said I’m an atheist, but the word has two distinct meanings. The first is a person who does not have a sense that there is a God–who, in short, is not [...]

I have a piece today in the Philadelphia Inquirer [registration required] on the “starve the beast” theory of taxation and fiscal discipline.
The philosophical thrust:
For many libertarians and conservatives, cutting taxes is about more than efficiency; it’s about morality. We have a moral claim to the fruits of our labor. Every cent the government takes from [...]

Frank McGahon, God bless’im, thinks I look like Billy Campbell, who, it bears mentioning, was one of People’s 50 Most Beautiful People of 2000. The difference is, if Jennifer Connelly had dated me, she never would have left.

Richard Rorty’s paper, “Philosopher-envy” in the new Daedalus issue on human nature is just trash. You’d think that someone who has given up rational argumentation would be a better rhetorician. Instead, Rorty seems like he’s just phoning it in. The sophism is almost too transparent to count as sophism. He must be tired. The paper [...]

Salam, Douthat, and Menashi have taken over at AndrewSullivan.com. Weirdness ensues, and it’s almost entirely Reihan’s fault (or to Reihan’s credit). Anyway, good stuff, at least that which is non-free-associative enough to comprehend.
The exchange between Reihan and Douthat about the pointlessness of affirmative action at elite schools reminded me of Marie Gryphon’s talk on [...]

Just an observation. Going through my blog roll, I noticed that the libertarian blogs have a rather cheerier general tone than both the left and right blogs. I find this interesting, because surely things are going not-so-well for us in political terms. The left seems extremely dyspeptic and chicken-littely these days. The right seems gloating, [...]

Spaces are opening up at 934 Westminster this fall. Just in case you wanted to know. You don’t really want to live in Georgetown, do you?

MLB’s extortion efforts seem to be falling apart here in the district! Jim Henley is your go-to man for reliable libertarian baseball analysis. Here. Here. Here.
For Carol Schwartz fans, here this tidbit from the NYT:
“I can just picture the baseball owners high-fiving each other until they collapsed from exhaustion” after reaching their deal with [...]

I agree with Warnock that not only should euthanasia be allowed, but that the stigma attached to surrendering to death be relaxed.
The amount of money spent to keep alive people for whom life has become nothing more than a searing wait for death is abominable. I cannot imagine wanting to spend tens of thousands [...]

This little piece by Dan Restrepo should be headed straight for the “examples of egregious logical fallacies” files of introduction to critical reasoning instructors everywhere. His “argument” appears to be this. Pinochet was evil. People with some association with Pinochet created a system of personal retirement accounts in Chile. So, personal retirement accounts are evil. [...]

Sometimes typos really improve a sentence. I snorted lemonade out my nose today when I read this:
Taking one example of a disorder that is “obvious from surface features,” Inhibited Female Orgasm, Wakefield applauds the authors of DSM-III-R for discriminating between those cases in which women fail to have organisms from inadequate stimulation and those involving [...]