What’s Living & Dead in Ayn Rand’s Moral & Political Thought?

January 18, 2010

That’s the topic of this month’s Cato Unbound. If you answer “nothing” to either half of the question, feel free to move right along. For the rest of you, Doug Rasmussen’s lead essay contains some really interesting questions (in addition to some really interesting analysis). Here’s his first question. What do you say?
What is Rand’s [...]

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Against Libertarian Self-Sabotage

January 18, 2010

This article in Reason by William Eggers and John O’Leary is the best diagnosis of self-defeating libertarian habits I’ve seen. I’m often frustrated with what I call libertarian schizophrenia — a kind of incoherent ping-ponging between public support for incremental reforms that would improve the function of both government and markets and the self-righteous performance of [...]

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Crisis and Leviathan

January 15, 2010

My new column for The Week, “Let the Next Crisis Go to Waste,” argues that the theme of the Aughts is the exploitation of crisis for political ends, and that the damn decade isn’t over yet (but not for pedantic math reasons).
Here’s one Robert Higgs (Mr. Crisis and Leviathan himself, I presume, or a passable [...]

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Happiness and the Delicacy of Taste

January 13, 2010

This is from David Hume’s essay “Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion.”
In short, delicacy of taste has the same effect as delicacy of passion: It enlarges the sphere both of our happiness and misery, and makes us sensible to pains as well as pleasures, which escape the rest of mankind.
I believe, however, everyone will [...]

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The Middle-Class Stagnation Canard

January 12, 2010

In a post yesterday, Kevin Drum signed on to a conjecture from Raghuram Rajan that stagnating middle-class incomes are partly to blame for the recession and the financial sector blowout. The insuperable problem with this conjecture is that middle-class incomes have not been stagnating. Over at Progressive Fix, Scott Winship lays down the data and reminds [...]

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The Problem with Liberaltarianism

January 7, 2010

According to Arnold Kling:
The problem is that liberals tend to affiliate themselves with Harvard types, and Harvard types believe that they are smarter than markets. And, at this moment in history, the Harvard narrative is that the financial crisis was caused because of blind faith in markets regulating themselves. According to this narrative, the election [...]

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Democracy and Disagreement

January 3, 2010

If Ezra Klein’s ongoing anti-supermajoritarian jihad is purely strategic, then I think I understand it. It is probably the best Democrats can do rhetorically to try pin the blame on Republicans for lousy governance under a Democratic president with solidly Democratic Congressional majorities (filibuster-trumping, even!). But it doesn’t make much substantive sense. Here’s Ezra’s key passage:
Ever since [...]

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Passage of the Day

December 30, 2009

When the Federal Government mans every checkpoint with a levitating ascended master whose great googly third eye pierces all the etherial layers of the transdimensional mutliverse, you can be sure that some clever bomber will find a loophole in the eighteenth dimension to scurry through. And it will still be very difficult to blow up an [...]

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Sumner on Experts

December 29, 2009

I agree:
In the last year my respect for authority, which was never very high, has fallen to a new low.  As I read each interview in the Big Think, it becomes more and more obvious that the experts don’t have a clue as to what went wrong, nor how to fix the problem.  Indeed they [...]

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The Senate Is Not Too Slow

December 29, 2009

Here’s Ezra Klein, complaining again about the Senate:
Most of the GOP’s filibusters are fruitless. According to PFAW, “a full 89% of the time, the cloture vote did nothing but delay the inevitable — a huge increase from the previous high of 56%.” And in a majority of those cases, cloture was passed with more than [...]

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Ackerman on Rawls

December 23, 2009

I just got around to reading Bruce Ackerman’s 1994 paper “Political Liberalisms,” and I wish I’d gotten to it sooner. It contains a splendid rant against Rawls’ stupid “closed society” assumption and some congenial speculation about the direction liberal progress might take:
It is true, of course, that we are a long way away from world [...]

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Now that Copenhagen’s Dead, Can We Say What We Think?

December 22, 2009

Here’s one of the most interesting things about the debate over climate policy prior to failure in Copenhagen. Advocates of a grand global accord seemed to grasp all along that the probability of securing an agreement with teeth was surpassingly small. However, to acknowledge this publicly would be to reduce the probability of success even [...]

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Callahan Against Fake Libertarian Clarity

December 22, 2009

Gene Callahan at ThinkMarkets offers an excellent post explaining why axiom-of-non-coercion-style libertarian arguments just aren’t very illuminating.
[E]very wavelength of the political spectrum considers some coercion to be OK, and some to be “aggression.” Anarcho-capitalists believe that coercing a trespasser off of one’s property is OK coercion, and collecting taxes to be “aggressive” coercion; while Marxists consider [...]

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Bernanke and the Pringles Problem

December 17, 2009

In response to this question:
Why haven’t you adopted a 3% per year inflation target?
Fed chair and Man of the Year Ben Bernanke said this:
The public’s understanding of the Federal Reserve’s commitment to price stability helps to anchor inflation expectations and enhances the effectiveness of monetary policy, thereby contributing to stability in both prices and economic [...]

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Good Questions from Casey Mulligan

December 17, 2009

To recap, New Keynesians tell us that income and labor usage increase when something reduces labor supply at the individual level, as long as the nominal interest rate does not adjust upward.
This miracle is exactly what centuries of tax collectors have dreamed about. They could take a larger share of the economic pie and in doing so [...]

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The Right-Wing Politics of Ressentiment

December 16, 2009

This glorious Julian Sanchez rant merits your attention:
Think back to the 2004 RNC—which I happened to be up in New York  covering. After witnessing three days of inchoate, spittle-flecked rage from the people who had the run of all three branches of government, some wag (probably Jon Stewart) puzzled over the “anger of the enfranchised.” [...]

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When You’re in a Liquidity Trap…

December 16, 2009

Here’s a fun game to play. Somebody says, “When you’re in a liquidity trap” … and then everybody shouts out moronic advice and wildly counterintuitive assertions. The first person to say something that really cracks everybody up wins!
Let’s try, shall we?
When you’re in a liquidity trap…

Klingon speakers suffer sexual exhaustion.
try horizontal stripes!
the standard meter is [...]

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John Allison and the Laissez Faire Financial Sector

December 16, 2009

Here’s John Allison, ex-CEO of BB&T and Ayn Rand enthusiast, arguing for a fully private banking system. As a second-best solution, Allison suggests taking away Fed discretion by having it more or less mechanically target a growth rate for the money supply, abolishing deposit insurance, and getting rid of GSE chimeras like Fanny and Freddie.

I [...]

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In the Happy Shadow of the Jones’s McMansion

December 16, 2009

As happiness studies become more fine-grained, they become more useful. This paper, drawing on the 2008 wave of the German Socio-Economic Panel Study, on the effects of relative income on self-reported happiness (and the effects of the self-reported importance of relative income on self-reported happiness!) contains many interesting findings, including this one, which Robert Frank might [...]

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What Progressive Redistribution Is For

December 15, 2009

It’s terrific to see Dalton Conley, the dean for the social sciences at NYU, write this in the American Prospect:
Inequality — and its consequences — is the wrong target. It’s time for progressives to spend less time trying to prove the effects of inequality on health, growth, and politics and instead start focusing on opportunity for those [...]

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Reverse Stone Soup Saves Lives!

December 15, 2009

Julian Sanchez finds the sausage unpalatable:
As I understand the current state of play, we willstill have a mandate and a “non-discrimination” rule, which more or less abandons any pretense that insurance is about managing risk (which is to say, that it’s actually insurance).  In other words, we’re eliminating the rationale for the role private insurance companies play [...]

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Hanson on the Philosophers’ Poll and Moral Realism

December 14, 2009

Robin Hanson looks at the recent poll of philosophers and finds “On only 2 of 30 topics was I strongly tempted to disagree with professionals.” Robin is of the opinion that aesthetic value is subjective, while philosophers on the whole tend to say it is objective. His other divergence from the balance of philosophical experts?
Meta-ethics: [...]

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Death by 41 Pricks

December 14, 2009

Ezra Klein takes a stand against the new party of death and its bosom pal, Joe Lieberman:
[T]he defeat of health-care reform will cost hundreds of thousands of lives. That’s not a particularly controversial statement. It relies on data from the Institute of Medicine and the Urban Institute, both of which are credible sources …
This is, I believe, [...]

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Philosophy Poll

December 13, 2009

Bryan Caplan posts some of the results from a recent poll of philosophers (in which I think I participated.) I’ve indicated my opinions below in bold text, just in case you give a damn. Of course, I don’t agree with the way the options have been broken down in some of the questions. In [...]

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The Triumph of Austrian Economics (in Tony Judt’s Mind)

December 10, 2009

Does this sound as bizarre to you as it does to me?
If we ask who exercised the greatest influence over contemporary Anglophone economic thought, five foreign-born thinkers spring to mind: Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Joseph Schumpeter, Karl Popper, and Peter Drucker. The first two were the outstanding “grandfathers” of the Chicago School of free-market [...]

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